OK, I was blocked a bit both by private life and by this ***** BIOS update thing...
To make it short: For N510 I would recommend to keep the Windows install, shrinking the partition to 20GB. It's a sacrifice, but if you do not need every GB it will make life easier. I did not try the dos usb boot method described in another thread here, simply because I needed a Windows (sig!) on a laptop (sig!sig!) in order to launch the BIOS updater and eventually be able to extract the files.
As I already wiped away the Win partition, I had to do some magic in order to reactivate the backup stored on the Samsung recovery partition (at least I left this one).
An important thing to know, is that as soon as you overwrite the MBR of your disk (for example with grub), the F4 recovery WON'T WORK ANYMORE.
In order to reactivate it, I had to boot this partition (like a Windows one) with grub. But the recovery program expects the Windows C: partition directly after its own partition (it does not re-create partitions), so I had to recreate my disk layout, moving the grub boot partition afterwards (and rewriting the MBR with grub, which is not included in the gentoo live CD, so I had to copy the binary from my other gentoo box - you see, I had fun figure this out step by step). And that's not all, since I recreated the WinXP partition, I also had to rewrite the partitions boot sector. As I had a working Windows boot sector on the recovery partition, a dd copy of its first sector did the trick...
Well, in the end I succeeded: I restored the Windows in a smaller partition and updated my BIOS with the official installer. No I will study, if I can create an USB boot medium from this install in order to get rid of the win partition (and the recovery partition, too).
I had to do so also for a very simple reason: I do not own any Windows install medium any more, from which I would have been able to create a virtualbox like suggested in the other thread. But I had a legal license on my disk, so did not want to do illegal things and waste time on this with strange windows images.
One thing is clear: The pre-installed windows really sucks. Not only because it's Windows, they also put a load of useless software which slows the machine down to unusable. Nice finding: Pointing IE to samsung.com and starting there a search from the homepage, MAKES IE CRASH. Seriously. Very good propaganda for your products, Samsung...
So obviously all this I did only in order to be able to reinstall my backup of gentoo
. Afterwards I will let you know, if the BIOS update was worth the effort...
.