My System

Note: This is an archived page. I am keeping it available because people still find it useful - but the contents of this page will likely become gradually out of date.

Here are the specifics of the machine I'm working with. Use this as a reference to see if what I discuss has any relevance to what you're trying to accomplish, in part or in whole. I would think most of what I've done would translate pretty directly to any other Dell Inspiron notebook; but other brands (or even other lines of Dell laptops) might require you deviate from my procedures.

My Hardware

Dell Inspiron 3800 laptop computer
Pentium III 600MHz with SpeedStep (hey, at the time I thought it smoked)
12 GB hard drive
160 MB RAM
ATI Rage Mobility M-1 video card w/ 8MB video RAM
- 14.1" XGA built-in LCD display w/ 1024x768 native resolution
- Viewsonic E790 19" external CRT display (at my job)
ESS Maestro 3 sound card
Alps touchpad + eraserhead
Internal DVD-ROM drive
Xircom RBEM56G-100 PCMCIA combo card (10/100 Ethernet, 56K modem)

My Operating Environment

I am dual-booting Windows 98 SE with Linux (Red Hat 7.1, kernel 2.4.2). In addition, I run VMware Workstation inside of Linux so I can use my Windows applications without needing to reboot in most cases.

In the Windows 98 SE environment (both "native" and under VMware) I keep most of my applications on a second partition - my D: drive. By using this as a raw disk in VMware I waste as little space as possible, because I don't have to keep two separate installations of software (especially space hogs like Office, Photoshop, etc.). Of course I still have to go through every install twice - but the second time I'm just overwriting the same directory...

My disk is divided up as follows (for more specifics, see the Recovering a Lost Partition Table page):

     Primary partition 1: Save-To-Disk
     Primary partition 2: Windows 98 SE C: drive
     Primary partition 3: Linux /boot
     Extended partitions:
       Extended partition 1: Linux /
       Extended partition 2: Linux swap
       Extended partition 3: Windows 98 SE D: drive

A side note: With the inherent limitations of the Master Boot Record (MBR) system, it's a good thing Linux isn't picky about the type of partitions it's living on!