Thinkpads Forum

Posted: **Sun Apr 05, 2009 10:27 am**

I bought my current T42 second hand. When I bought it, it had Xandros Linux installed along with GRUB and Windows XP. The Rescue & Recovery partition was still on the hard drive, and it would begin to boot, but it would stop with a fatal error. I have since replaced Xandros Linux with Mandriva Linux 2008.1. Windows XP is still on the hard drive.

I just stumbled across the solution this morning at ThinkWiki to get Rescue & Recovery to boot. The following needs to be in the /boot/grub/menu.lst file.

Code: Select all

title           IBM Rescue and Recovery
root            (hd0,1)
parttype        (hd0,1) 0x0b
unhide          (hd0,1)
chainloader     +1

ThinkWiki wrote:The MBR written by GRUB can be used to launch the Rescue and Recovery application. However, if you leave the type of the Rescue and Recovery partition to 0x12 (Compaq diagnostics), trying to boot this partition will result in an error message "c000021a, Fatal System Error". To avoid that, and to make sure the recovery partition is always of the right type, add a line to change the partition type to 0x0b (FAT32) to the Rescue and Recovery partition's entry in your /boot/grub/menu.lst. Also, as we will be hiding the Rescue and Recovery partition from Windows (see below), we need to unhide the partition here to make sure it will be visible and bootable. So, assuming your Rescue and Recovery partition is the second partition, the GRUB entry would look like this:

http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Rescue_and_Recovery

Note that there is some additional information in the ThinkWiki link above that should be read by anyone planning to add this change to their GRUB menu.lst file.

Posted: **Sun Apr 05, 2009 11:43 pm**

Thank you for posting this, it has definitely shed some light on using GRUB with the R&R partition.

Have you resized your main c: partition?

I was thinking of using GPartEd Live to do this on a new X61s. Right now, there is 1 large c: NTFS partition and then the R&R partition.

Was thinking of using GPartEd to shrink c and then place a ext3 partitions between it and the R&R, resulting in: NTFS, then ext3 (scratch VM, /root, /boot, etc), finally R&R at end.

Have used GPartEd to resize and move other NFTS/Linux installs with full success, just not sure how this would affect the R&R and Thinkvantage..

Posted: **Mon Apr 06, 2009 4:55 am**

I have not used GPartEd, but I believe the person I bought the T42 from probably did. Using the Product Recovery Discs remove all existing partitions and put in place one partition for Windows and one partition for Rescue and Recovery. He must have used some sort of partitioning tool to add 2 partitions after Restoring Factory Contents to the hard drive.

After Restoring Factory Contents, he added one partition for Xandros and another as a common FAT32 partition to be shared between Windows XP and Xandros. He then installed a copy of Xandros on the hard drive. I still use the hard drive as the seller partitioned it. I only replaced Xandros with Mandriva.

Posted: **Tue Jun 02, 2009 12:44 am**

Thanks for that link Gomjabbar.

I probably have this link in a couple of PM's and replies. I'm just a little tired and worn from reinstalling my recovery partition and OS to Factory reset.

I guess my thing is I have an 80 gb hard drive and really don't know what size to make my Windows and the rest of the partitions. I would like some suggestions and don't know where to ask.

I don't want to be a bother with what probably seems like the same questions I've been asking for the last two or three weeks. I'm just new at this and don't know much about something ppl here probably do for a living.

thanks.

Thinkpads Forum

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