Hey guys,

1st question, im being lazy (i.e. not looking for the answer myself) but, will I have any significant speed problems relating to accessing my vista ntfs partition from debian - music etc... is still stored on it.

2nd question ,I have actually tried to find this out. I have an Acer Laptop with Debian installed, and I have a recovery partition, coming up as "Comapq Diagnostic" under fdisk. Can I mount this? I need to back it up to DVD as, for reason i dont want to get into, i managed to break the functionality to create the disk under windows. (in brief, my 120 gb hard disk came with 1x50gb and 1x60gb partition, so i wiped one out and consolidated. Then I found out the DVD Creator needed to use some of the space on the now-non-existant drive in order to create the disk - stupid i reckon)

Cheers guys!

on the first question I'll have to say that it depends... There are several ways to reach an NTFS partition. If all you want to do is to read files from it there should be very little problem since that is built into the kernel or as a module. It is also the safest approach. And the speed penalty should be minimal. If you want to write to the NTFS-partition things get a little more complicated.

I tried to look for a way to access the Compaq diagnostics partition but could not find any. My best bet would be to contact Compaq and tell them whatever... and that you have trouble accessing your recoverypartition.

/LinuxSam