I picked up a new computer, it has all compatible hardware, except the SATA drive potentially.

Anyway, it is an HP and has a restore partition, I would like to keep this, which is no problem, I can(should be able to) edit the partition table accordingly.

However I am running into a few problems trying to do this:

1) The drive only lets me have 4 primary (following the manual install instructions I don't have enough with the restore partition taking up one)
Now I read in the forums that the cache partition is no longer necessary and the instructions from the site have simply not been updated to reflect this yet.
If this is true, than I can just use the three spots I need.
However, I am concerned as to how Knoppmyth checks the partitions and what to install on.
My partitions are as follows (as cfdisk sees them):
/dev/sdb1 - Windows partition (will be deleted)
8.09 MB of free space
/dev/sdb2 - restore partition

so deleting the windows partition, will give me:
/dev/sdb(1, 3 and 4) to play with

Will I be able to select which partitions to use as what at a later step?
I would rather not have it overwrite the restore partition as HP feels like not providing restore CDs anymore.

On a slightly related note:

Should I not be able to define a logical partition and then create several partitions within this, in order to get more than 4 partitions on my hard drive. Now I'll admit its been awhile since Ive needed to do this, but I know for a fact my laptop has in all about 9 partitions set up, running Windows XP, Gentoo, and Kubuntu; now it is an IDE drive admittedly, is this a limitation of SATA, or using SATA with Knoppix, or SATA with the cfdisk utility?
Unfortunately, my kubuntu, crk and dsl discs don't like the hardware setup, so I don't actually have a distro that can successfully access the drive with just the standard fdisk. Actually these discs while booting from the CD cannot see my cd-drive either, but thats another issue. The Knoppmyth CD sees and detects everything just fine.

Thanks for the help.

All you need to do is follow the manual installation instructions. Simply partition the drive as you see fit... You no longer need /cache.

_________________
cesman

When the source is open, the possibilities are endless!