#HDD setup#
Saving the PREDESKTOP area
After doing a lot of research, it was clear that I would need to order the recovery CDs from IBM. Therefore I decided that I am gonna go ahead and try different solutions that came up in my research.

I started with Linux's KNOPPIX Live distro. It booted my machine smoothly. I tried to check my HDD using qtparted. It could not read my HDD partition information because I had set the PREDESKTOP area to secure. So I went back to BIOS and changed the secure setting. This is despite the fact that all sites/ forums I read had warned me on changing this setting.

Booted with KNOPPIX again.... and now qtparted could read the partition information. It had :
1. NTFS Partition (~53GB)
2. Free space (~4GB)
The above Free space was not really FREE. This is where the PREDESKTOP area is.

qtparted allows you to shrink the partition and this is what I intended to do. Here is what I did :
1. Noted the numbers for the start and end of the current Free space (i.e. PREDESKTOP area)
2. Shrinked the NTFS partition to 25 GB
3. Created a FAT32 partition starting at 25GB and going up to 40GB (The trick here is to ensure that you stay away from the cylinders on HDD where the initial Free space was)
4. Created another 5 GB ext3 partition (for /homr)
5. Created an extended partition - and created root, swap and boot on this partition
PLEASE NOTE: ALL THIS WHILE I ENSURED THAT NONE OF THE NEW PARTITIONS OVERWRITE ANY OF THE SECTORS WHERE THE INITIAL FREE SPACE (I.E. PREDESKTOP AREA) WAS.

I rechecked the above thrice before committing the changes to the disk.