As you can see in this screen shot, there seems to be a 3rd partition on what's supposed to be a 2 partition hard drive. Is there a way to access it? And why don't I see it in Explorer?
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As you can see in this screen shot, there seems to be a 3rd partition on what's supposed to be a 2 partition hard drive. Is there a way to access it? And why don't I see it in Explorer?
I think it does what it says it does - it's full of Compaq diagnostics.
> And why don't I see it in Explorer?
Because of the 255 different partition types, explorer on recognises a handful.
> Is there a way to access it?
Press F1 when you boot perhaps (or whatever the magic key is to access the BIOS from startup).
I've worked on a Compaq recently and the access key was F10. I imagine different models may use different 'magic key'.
Nope, no F key works.
Are there places that you can store data on a hard drive that is outside of the partitions?
If you use a partition manager you can set the Compaq diagnostic partition to the active partition on the hard drive. I've recently done this w/ a Dell laptop.
Or you can delete the partition altogether and resize C or D with tools like Partition Magic
Wow. Five gigabytes. That's a lot of tools. Sounds to me like a copy of Windows XP is being stored on that partition as well for rescue disk purposes.
The whole idea of storing "system recovery" on the very piece of hardware which is most likely to fail just seems dumb to me.
For consumer laptops, the most likely piece to fail is the consumer. Rescue partitions like this one store a complete (possibly compressed) copy of the initial setup image, along with the tools to flash the other partitions and restore the image. Voila, clean setup.
My recently bought Lenovo laptop also had such a partition, containing a full Win2k. It took up about 5 Gigs of my 160, too. Until I deleted everything and installed Linux, that is.
Hope at least they provide a drivers disk and don't rely entirely on the hard drive for storing this stuff.
I always format, partition, and reinstall when I buy a computer or laptop. I like things to be the way I'm used too; 1 Partition for the OS, 1 Partition for software, 1 Partition for backups, downloads, and working files.
I definitely don't waste 4 gigs on a system backup.
My Dell has a sort-of-Win2000 compressed on it with the diagnostics, actually pretty small.
Not the Lenovo one.Quote:
Originally Posted by Mario F.