Help - understanding Dell Studio 1537 partitions ?

English Install/Boot/Login
1

This is not strictly a Linux question, although I am interested in any Linux cautions as to what to avoid that could impact my Linux on the computer in question.

I have Linux (openSUSE-11.1) setup on dual boot with MS-Vista on a Dell Studio 1537 laptop. My wife is “fed up” with Vista, and has asked that I replace Vista with WinXP on this Laptop. I would like to do this over the Christmas holiday break. The laptop’s 1 year support warrantee has expired.

Please, can someone explain to me the function of the two Dell /dev/sda1 and /dev/sda2 partitions ?

This laptop was purchased with MS Vista installed, with 3 primary partitions (small /dev/sda1 (called “Dell Utility” ),10GB /dev/sda2 (unknown - appears to be some sort of Dell backup/recovery partition ? ), /dev/sda3 (MS Vista which had the remainder of the 250GB drive, although I have subsequently reduced this to 69GB ).

Again, I note /dev/sda3 is the 69GB MS Vista partition (I reduced it to 69GB when I installed Linux (openSUSE-11.1)). I also believe it may be in /dev/sda3 where I should plan on installing winXP.

Currently I have openSUSE-11.1 Linux in /dev/sda4 (divided into extended partitions, with /dev/sda5 (swap), /dev/sda6 (root), and /dev/sda7 (/home) for Linux and it works well. I plan to keep openSUSE-11.1 Linux when Vista is replaced by WinXP

Can I remove and merge /dev/sda1, /dev/sda2, and /dev/sda3 and replace them with one partition for WinXP ?

Or am I better OFF keeping /sdev/sda1 (Dell Utility) ? and am I better off to keep /dev/sda2 (some sort of Vista ?? recovery) ? and only put winXP on /dev/sda3 ?

Aside from the MBR with Grub being destroyed (when I replace Vista with winXP) is there anything else I need to be careful of wrt keeping my openSUSE-11.1 Linux install on this laptop ?

I’ve also sent a slightly different version of this post as a question to the Dell Support mailing list.

p.s. for information, here is some output from Linux commands showing the contents:

Output of: df -Th

Filesystem    Type    Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda6     ext3     20G  7.9G   11G  43% /
udev         tmpfs    2.0G  260K  2.0G   1% /dev
/dev/sda7     ext3    131G   61G   63G  50% /home
/dev/sda2  fuseblk     10G  5.1G  5.0G  51% /windows/D
/dev/sda3  fuseblk     69G   39G   31G  56% /windows/C

Output of: fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 250.0 GB, 250059350016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x08000000

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1               1          18      144553+  de  Dell Utility
/dev/sda2              19        1324    10485760    7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3            1325       10247    71673997+   7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda4   *       10248       30401   161887005    f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda5           10248       10509     2104483+  82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda6           10510       13120    20972826   83  Linux
/dev/sda7           13121       30401   138809601   83  Linux
2

You should probably leave the first two partitions alone. The first seems to contain Dell diagnostic tools and the second is a reimaging partition for restoring OEM Vista. I suppose you could do without the second since you never intend to use Vista again. In which case you could merge it with sda3 and gain a bit most room for XP.

3

Thanks for the recommendation.

I believe the basis of your “leave the first two partitions alone” recommendation is there could be a time where the current contents of /dev/sda1 and /dev/sda2 may be of use in the future? I can not see the future, and since this is for my wife, its always possible she may want me to put Vista back ON. So yes, that definitely reads to be a reasonable recommendation, and putting winXP on /dev/sda3 may be the easiest for me, if the MS-Windows (service pack 3) installation CD lets me. :slight_smile:

4

maybe you should resize your partition,then enlarge one partition to install the large files