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?
an invisible partition?
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).
If you dance barefoot on the broken glass of undefined behaviour, you've got to expect the occasional cut.
If at first you don't succeed, try writing your phone number on the exam paper.
I've worked on a Compaq recently and the access key was F10. I imagine different models may use different 'magic key'.
Favorite Quote:
>For that reason someone invented C++.
BLASPHEMY! Begone from my C board, you foul lover of objects, before the gods of C cast you into the void as punishment for your weakness! There is no penance for saying such things in my presence. You are henceforth excommunicated. Never return to this house, filthy heretic!
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
Originally Posted by brewbuck:
Reimplementing a large system in another language to get a 25% performance boost is nonsense. It would be cheaper to just get a computer which is 25% faster.
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.
Last edited by Frobozz; 12-11-2006 at 01:44 AM.
The whole idea of storing "system recovery" on the very piece of hardware which is most likely to fail just seems dumb to me.
If you dance barefoot on the broken glass of undefined behaviour, you've got to expect the occasional cut.
If at first you don't succeed, try writing your phone number on the exam paper.
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.
All the buzzt!
CornedBee
"There is not now, nor has there ever been, nor will there ever be, any programming language in which it is the least bit difficult to write bad code."
- Flon's Law
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.
Originally Posted by brewbuck:
Reimplementing a large system in another language to get a 25% performance boost is nonsense. It would be cheaper to just get a computer which is 25% faster.
My Dell has a sort-of-Win2000 compressed on it with the diagnostics, actually pretty small.
Not the Lenovo one.Originally Posted by Mario F.
All the buzzt!
"There is not now, nor has there ever been, nor will there ever be, any programming language in which it is the least bit difficult to write bad code."
- Flon's Law
