Difference between revisions of "Installation instructions for the ThinkPad G41"

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What I've done so far:
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Specific installation notes for the Thinkpad T41p.
  
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).
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Please choose (or create) the Operating System of interest:
  
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
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*[[:Category:Gentoo|Gentoo]] [[Installing Gentoo on a ThinkPad G41|Installation]]
  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.
 

Revision as of 02:53, 9 May 2005

Specific installation notes for the Thinkpad T41p.

Please choose (or create) the Operating System of interest: