I just got my new netbook out of the box. It arrived on Wednesday, but I told myself I wouldn't open it until I'd finished a bunch of coding for my dissertation. The coding's done and now the box is open!After doing a lot of shopping and reading, I went with Toshiba's NB305 netbook. 1.66MHz processor, 2GB RAM, full size keyboard, 10.1" screen, 3 USB ports, 11 hours of battery. About $350 with the RAM upgrade. Here's the link on amazon.
The netbook worked right out of the box. Less than 10 minutes to go through Windows' registration ("No. No. Remind me later. Disable.") and get connected to my home wireless. The new keyboard took another 5 minutes to get used to, and I'm still figuring out the two-touch trackpad. So far, so good. The machine gets high marks for plug-and-play web browsing.
One snag: I want to partition the hard drive and install Linux. Before doing that, I want to create a boot disk to restore the original OS if something goes wrong. Unfortunately, Windows wants ~10GB of space for the disk image. The only storage device I have with that much space is an external hard drive, and I already have a lot of other data stored on it. There's enough space on the hard drive, but I don't want to set aside the whole thing as a boot disk.
Is there a way to use only part of an external hard drive as a boot disk?
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