On 20150326_1551-0400, Bob Bernstein wrote: > Shortly I will become the owner of a refurbished Dell with Win7 already on > its 160g sata hard drive. > > I have no need or use for a multi-OS multi-boot machine. I only want wheezy > on this for now. > > Question: can I entrust to the Debian installer the task of repartitioning > and formatting the HD with all that Windoze cruft already on it? > > Or, are there steps I ought to take prior to launching the installer, > perhaps involving other disk tools? I don't trust what M$ puts on hard > drives! > > TIA Debian peeps! > > -- > These are not the droids you are looking for.
Others have already advised making a restore disk of Win7. My experience is that refurb Dells with Win7 installed come with a restore disk. *BUT!!!! a big caveat: The supplied 'restore disk' does not actually contain a copy of the system. What it does is bypass some BIOS code that blocks copying a backup copy of Win7 in a hidden partition on HD and also patch into the newly restored Win7 certain things that are looked for by code in the boot RAM that let a normal, to the Microsoft world, boot. To get rid of this hidden partition, you will have to use dd to overwrite it with zero bytes. After that, you have a pure Debian box, or as a friend of mine who told me about this, it you don't succeed in getting Debian installed you have a oddly shaped boat anchor. IMHO, it is definitely *not* a no-brainer. You might, instead, investigate buy a new SATA drive, maybe larger than the one containing Win7 and install the new SATA. Check the facts, as best you can. Low price larger SATA drives that I have seen on the web seem all to be refurb HDD. I may be wrong in all these points: Caveat Emptor. -- Paul E Condon pecon...@mesanetworks.net -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/20150327030928.gc15...@big.lan.gnu
