217.231.117.119 at 01:52, 9 May 2005

2005-05-09T01:52:23Z

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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 [http://www.gentoo.org/ Gentoo] LiveCD and a [http://www.sysresccd.org/ 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.

[[Category:Gentoo]] [[Category:G41]]

Installing Gentoo on a ThinkPad G41 - Revision history

217.231.117.119 at 01:52, 9 May 2005