[mdlug] T61 Thinkpad Recovery Partition

[Peter Bart]

On Mon, 2008-02-11 at 09:35 -0500, Michael Rudas wrote:
> On Feb 11, 2008 7:38 AM, Peter Bart wrote:
> 
> >>  Have you tried to re-write the MBR (bootblock)?
> >> With MBRWiz, you can do so even if the drive is hooked up externally
> >> on another PC, or "fdisk /mbr" will do it from a MS-DOS 6/Win98/WinME
> >> boot floppy -- you can get those from http://www.bootdisk.com
> 
> > Don't think because I didn't say anything I've ignored that, just the
> > opposite!  That does look most promising. I've been working on that
> > option.
> My thought was that
> you could pop out the drive (I think it's relatively easy on that
> model) and use an external USB drive interface to hang it off another
> PC and clobber it that way...

	Okay, I got the mbrwiz executable onto a memory card, that went into a
Nokia 770, that connected via usb cable too the T61 which was running on
a live cd. I apparently was able to find the right commands because I
got a complaint about missing shared libraries. Bummer. I found Parted
Magic which might do what I need and it's a live cd based on Linux. It's
running testdisk as we speak. If that doesn't work I'll try a MS boot
disk from the link you sent. I think my only other option would be to
restore my system with the recovery cd's I have and release the
partition from within XP. I'm not sure which is more agonizing.
	Interestingly I was told by Lenovo software support I had invalidated
my warranty because I had deleted XP despite the fact that Lenovo
supposedly supports Linux. That after being given some vague reference
to releasing the hidden partition from within the bios. They weren't
able to point me to the specific option. Kind of disappointing but I
know I live far below their level of consciousness.



-- 
Peter Bart <peter at petertheplumber.net>
http://petertheplumber.net