On Sun, 20 Mar 2005, Edwin Humphries wrote:
> G'day all,
>
> I've just inherited a Dell Dimension 8300. It has a single 120Gb SATA
> drive, and I'd like to repartition with a view to dual-booting. It's
> got
> an OEM partition on the first 31 Mb of the drive.
>
> When I try to boot with the System Rescue CD (to use NTFSresize), I
> get an error message "hda: host proected area => 1" and the boot
> hangs. I'm assuming that this refers to the OEM partition - is this
> right? How do I get the bootloader to ignore this partition?
>
I'm not sure what the system rescue CD is but if it's trying to re-create
the typical Dell setup/diagnostic partition and finding it's already there
and not going any further then this is probably a good thing.
What you most likely want to do is proceed merrily with your favourite
Linux install but be careful to select manual partitioning options. Avoid
changing the first partition, it's a DOS-FAT-12 partition in disguise so
you can add it to your Linux boot loader menu (lilo, grub or other). At
minimum you'll want to add say 100MB /boot, 1GB swap and the rest can be /
(the root filesystem). Feel free to overwrite the MBR (Master Boot Record)
with your boot loader - that shouldn't affect the partition itself.
It's worth noting that should the hard drive fail Dell has (or at least
did last time I looked) floppy disk images for re-creating the
Setup/Diagnostic partition. You can probably perform the setup/diags from
the floppies too (useful for older machines which didn't have auto HDD
detection). .... Hmm actually I'm confusing this with some Compaq gear but
I think Dell is similar.
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