Installation instructions for the ThinkPad G41

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Revision as of 06:49, 29 March 2005 by 220.244.224.9 (Talk)
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What I've done so far:

I initially booted the machine and the installed Access IBM software (I presume) converted the primary FAT32 to NTFS. I downloaded a Gentoo LiveCD and a System Rescue CD (known to have ntfsresize).

In my scouting around on the net, I read that the Thinkpads have a have a Rescue and Recovery partition which must be the 4th entry in the partition table. It occupies the final 4Gb of the drive as a primary partition. Using the System Rescue CD, I resized the partition on my 80 Gb drive to 30Gb. The space made available between the end of the resized NTFS partition (/dev/hda1) and the Rescue and Recovery partition (/dev/hda4) was split into a primary partition to act as a boot partition (/dev/hda2), and an extended partition (/dev/hda3). The extended partition was further subdivided into a 2Gb swap partition (/dev/hda5) and all of the remaining space as a root partition for Linux. N.B. If you are using fdisk, rather than the excellent QTParted (accessed as run_qtparted from the System Rescue CD), you will have to fix the order of the partition table entries using the 

  x   extra functionality (experts only)

entry on the first fdisk menu, then the 

  f   fix partition order

entry on the expert menu, after you have created the new linux partitions. The end result looks like this: 

Disk /dev/hda: 80.0 GB, 80026361856 bytes
240 heads, 63 sectors/track, 10337 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 15120 * 512 = 7741440 bytes

  Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1   *           1        4058    30678448+   7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda2            4059        4072      105840   83  Linux
/dev/hda3            4073        9794    43258320    f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/hda4            9795       10337     4105080   12  Compaq diagnostics
/dev/hda5            4073        4343     2048728+  82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/hda6            4344        9794    41209528+  83  Linux

After the initial Gentoo installation using grub, I was able to boot Gentoo and XP. XP complained on booting, but was able to sort itself out. I think that fdisk may affect the MBR in a slightly different way from QTParted. When setting up grub, I provided an entry for the R&R partition, like so: 

# For booting the IBM Rescue & Recovery partition
title=Access IBM
rootnoverify (hd0,3)
chainloader +1

However, when I try to boot that partition, I am told there is no operating system, so it apparently does not have a bootstrap in the usual place. I have asked IBM about this, but have yet to receive a reply.

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