MEPIS Community Forum

Hi, all.

This is a two-parter, but both parts are related. Just acquired the above i5 laptop with Intel 2450 and Radeon 6650M hybrid graphics. There is no apparent method to switch off or change graphics in BIOS.

Hours and hours of research has shown these hybrid graphics to be a PITA in respect of Linux, with no easy solution to get them working. So far, only my SM11 live CD will boot.

1. What's the likelihood of SM or one of its variants working if going for a full install? And does anyone know of a distro that is reasonably comfortable with hybrid graphics? Can't find one so far.

Now the related part: the HDD is 500gig - 200MB boot, 425gig C:, 30gig Lenovo D:, hidden recovery partition for remainder. That's three primaries, and the Lenovo D: occupying a 30gig extended partition. Nonsense.

Everything I've read on Win 7 forums and Lenovo support talk about not tampering with partitions because the one-key recovery won't work. Well, I shrank C: down to a manageable size, and that left about 350+ gig of unallocated space in which to enlarge the extended partition for logical drives (I want my SM back.) Big problem, the extended partition wouldn't enlarge to the left (GParted). Something about its geography...? The one-key recovery recognised the smaller C: drive, but I had to enlarge it again then run one-key to get the size back and a factory-fresh install. No support has ever answered the question as to why the D: drive won't resize.

2. Any input would be magnificent on resizing a Lenovo drive and not getting into the immense problems that a lot are getting into (laptop back to Lenovo for resetting).

So, I could trash it all and dump Win 7 (I'd rather keep it for some minimal usage), but that would be pointless if there's little chance of getting any distro to work satisfactorily with the hybrid graphics.

Any input/comment welcomed.

Cheers

You can legally download the W7 ISOs from Digital River:

http://www.mydigitallife.info/official- ... tal-river/

Wipe the drive and reinstall without all the nonsense. Use the key code that's on the machine.

Alternatively, you should be able to replace the hard drive, set the original aside for safekeeping, and again install from the disk the way you want. Activation should not be a problem -- a hard drive swap doesn't count enough for being flagged as a pirate. If it does, a call to M$ should be all you need to get it activated.

Can't help with the hybrid graphics.

Thank you, uncle mark. I had thought of that previously, but wasn't sure - if it came to it - about wiping the 200mb boot partition. I take it Win 7 would sort that afresh on install? Obviously the OKR (one-key recovery) would go, but so what?

That may well be the route if I can get some info on hybrid graphic success stories!

Cheers again.

Some people with the nvidia & intel hybrid graphics combo were able to use the xdrvr=intel confx cheats.

So you might try:

or

The first forces the intel driver to be used. The second forces the intel driver and disables radeon kms stuff. {I'm not sure if that's necessary or not}


You might also be able to do the opposite i.e. force the radeon driver and disable the intel driver.

or

For all four of them I think you might also need to make sure that there's no 'vga=xxx' on the kernel options line.

Thank you so much for that, kmathern. Page bookmarked for when I take the plunge.

Cheers

OEM installs use the separate boot partition to facilitate being able to invoke the recovery partition and all that crap. When I've done new, fresh, bare metal installs, I've always installed it to a single NTFS partition without issue.

The one and only time I've done a reinstall of an OEM install from disk, I took the drive down to bare metal (it was the worst infected machine I have ever seen, bar none), set up a single NTFS partition, fed it the key code when prompted, and installed without issue.

Good luck. I'm always concerned with these scenarios, what with the way both M$ and the OEMs have everything so convoluted. I've had good luck, but I'm always apprehensive.

Let me tell 'ya about apprehensive......

The recovery partition can not be expanded to the left, but it can be moved to the left and additional extended partitions added as required, should you wish to go that way.

I will fire up my E320 in a few moments and paste a snapshot of my partitioning schema. I elected to keep all partitions intact because I was not sure if I was going to keep it or not, but because I am loathe to run such a low end OS like Windows, I re-arranged the partitions to accomodate Mepis.

Thanks for the input. Your quote above and snapshot fooled me. Reading left to right, I have primary boot, primary C: (massive), extended D: (Lenovo logical of 30gig filling the extended partition), hidden primary. Your Lenovo partition is a primary, whereas mine is not.

I shrank C:, then moved the left edge of the extended to the left to fill the unallocated space (the left edge of the Lenovo logical went with it as well.) Then dragged the right edge of the Lenovo logical to the left to make it about 30gig again. Now I would have a 300+gig extended partition, but it balked and wouldn't expand the extended partition to the left.

So should I have shrunk C:, moved the extended partition to the left, THEN expanded it to the right to be able to accommodate more logical drives? In a nutshell, swap the relative sizes of the C: primary and Lenovo extended.

Cheers

Update for anyone else with this sort of configuration on Lenovos:

The contents (and one hidden directory) of the Lenovo D: logical drive occupying the whole of a 30gig extended partition, was copied to a couple of places, and the partition was cloned as well. Test runs of various setup files from D: showed that all progs and drivers could be installed from anywhere. So D: could go (don't know about the one-key recovery and its relationship with D: - but that's out of the window now anyway.)

Win 7 64-bit iso downloaded from digitalriver and burned. C: shrunk to a manageable size with GParted - D: and extended partition deleted and all reformed.

Win 7 installed - all progs installed from copies of D:. Win 7 activated. The boot and hidden partition were left untouched.

So far all tickety-boo. Later I'll try some distros to see how far I get with hybrid graphics.

Thanks for the input which helped me bite the bullet and get on with it. Always scary on a new machine...