New
#1
HP laptop has used up all four primary partitions
Hi
I’ve just bought a new laptop - an HP G62 with Windows 7 Home Premium preinstalled - on which I had been hoping to dual boot Linux. Imagine my dismay then when I discovered that HP in their wisdom have used up all four primary partitions as follows:
1. System 199MB
2. (C:) 219GB
3. (D:) Recovery 13.56GB
4. (E:) HP Tools 103MB
I am seriously considering therefore whether to reinstall Windows 7 from scratch and partition the drive the way I want it, rather than the way HP thinks I want it. As I assume there is no way of extracting the Windows operating system from the files on the recovery partition, I need to give some thought to how to achieve this.
I already have a desktop computer with Windows 7 Home Premium, for which I have the proper MS installation DVD. Both the desktop computer and the new laptop have OEM product IDs in the form of xxxxx-OEM-xxxxxxx-xxxxx, so would it work if I used the desktop’s DVD to do a fresh installation on the HP laptop - but obviously enter the laptop’s Windows Serial Number? Would MS accept that when I activate the installation? I realise of course I would need to download all the necessary hardware drivers for the laptop from the HP site as I assume they too are not separately extractable from the recovery partition. Don’t these computer manufacturers make life hard for us!!
I have created my own Recovery Discs using HP’s Recovery Manager, so I am not bothered about losing the recovery partition. I should be extremely grateful for any comments on my proposed way of proceeding. In the meantime I am having to make do by running Ubuntu 10.04 on VirtualBox in Windows.