Thinkpads Forum

This week I’ve downloaded Mint 13 Maya (Cinnamon) and have installed 10G partitions on a couple of old desktop machines and everything is more or less hunky dory.

I have a Thinkpad T42. The live-DVD appears flawless: hibernation, wireless, etc. – just a beautiful distribution!

However, the factory OEM config has the 1 hard drive with two partitions: the main XP (ntfs) and what I guess is the 4.5G factory recovery image (fat32).

On the Mint “Installation type” window, normally there are 3 options, and you can drag back and forth the size of your new Mint partition to be created within the main ntfs area, but with this ThinkPad install, that third (middle) option is missing – I only have these two:

- “Erase disc and install Linux Mint”
- “Something else”

And within “Something else”, I’ve taken what I think is every path, but I’m only allowed to nuke one of the existing partitions:

1 device (dev/sda) with, 2 partitions (both OEM):
- dev/sda1 – ntfs and,
- dev/sda2 – fat32 [4.5G – the recovery image]

Sure, I can nuke the recovery partition, but I don’t really want to. I don’t need the extra disc space, and I want to “go back to zero” if I ever hand off the machine. The CD discs are like $50.

What to do? Workaround to get the three partitions?

I’m thinking the ThinkPad community should be the first port of call.

Thanks in advance!

Welcome to thinkpads.com ipso!

If it were me, I would make recovery disks from the "hidden" partition if that option is still available. If not, then I would run "Restore to Factory", which will restore the option to burn recovery disks. Now you have the option to go back to factory state, should you ever want to, and there will be no issues with allowing Mint to use the entire disk.

Another option would be to use something like Acronis to make an image of the current hard drive configuration then nuke the drive and install Mint. Should you ever want to go back, just restore the image.

I’m thinking the Mint installer – seeing one partition NTFS, and another fat32 – is deducing there are two distinct operating systems already on the machine, and thus precluding itself from interjecting into what is already a dual boot system.

That’s a complete swag.

I hate the idea of an empty machine and unconfirmed discs to get me back to OEM, but your recommendation is solid. Thank you.

Also, this thought just came to me - maybe I can dig up an old copy of Partition Magic I have around here somewhere (that I’ve never used) and carve out a 10G partition, and then let the Mint install nuke away at that.

Yuck. For me rebooting a PC to solve a problem is like drinking martinis – 2 somehow turns into far too many, and an all day event or longer. You know you are having fun on your 18th reboot.

Nothing could have been more interesting to Sherlock 20 years ago. But now I’m too old - and cranky.

Thanks again!

Moderator edit: Moved topic to the "Linux Questions" conference.

(Sorry for posting in the wrong place – thanks for moving it.)

I never did get the dual-boot to work on the T42.

I used Partition Magic to carve out 10GB because for some reason the Mint install didn’t, but that app hosed my XP-SP3 hard drive. I ran chkdsk /r before and there were no errors.

“Error 110 on partition starting at 2048 on disk 1. The length of the partition in the partition table is incorrect. The CHS length is 156xxxxxx, the LBA length is 156xxxxx and the File system length is 156xxxxx. The program has determined that the length can be changed to the correct value of 156308512. (none of the numbers matched.) Reboot.

Error #1826 / Error: Free space not found – Reboot.

I was not able to recover using the IBM recovery discs, nor do I see how the 5GB OEM fat32 sw image did me any good. I was not able to access it via any F key or otherwise – only the BIOS. Hosed. Kaput.

I had to nuke the whole drive (using GParted) and installed Mint 13 – which works marvelously – but my OEM Windows image/drivers are gone and unrecoverable if I ever want to handoff the machine to someone.