HP/Compaq Presario and Linux

[Travis Roy]

> I'll second this. In fact, every Compaq that I've ever seen does 
> this. It's usually the last partition on the disk, is roughly 32MB 
> in size and generally of a type not recognized by Linux fdisk or fips.

It was actually the first partition and it was 5 GIGS in size.
 
> If you do manage to remove this partition, you can get it back by 
> running the recovery CD that came with your Compaq. Then, you'll 
> want to repartition the drive and not touch the one that meets the 
> above criteria. You usually can't miss it, 'cause it shows up as 
> Partition 4 on a system with only 2 partitions. 

You say that like new computers come with rescue CDs.. This Compaq did not. There is a utility to 
create them to CD-R(W) media, but you're only allowed to do it once.

I did manage to finally get FreeBSD working. What I ended up having to do was repartiton the drive, 
let it recover to partiton 2 (the next one after the rescue partiton). It left the other two new partitions 
along.

Linux CDs still would not boot correctly, still no idea why. The only ones I could get were a live 
rescue CD (not Knoppix). Anything else would just cause the system to reboot.