Making ThinkVantage button boot linux

[own6volvos]

Does anyone know exactly what the bios looks for to boot off of when the user presses this button? Is it boot anything off a certain partition number? I want to take advantage of this, and make a seemless bootloader-less setup go go between windows and ubuntu.

[christopher_wolf]

The BIOS looks for the HPA when the Access IBM button is pressed during boot up; to my knowledge, I don't know if it is possbile to link it to a bootloader; See

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

You can also view the contents of the HPA, but be careful.

[yossarian]

I would hazard a guess that the instructions that make the computer try boot the HPA when that particular key is pressed is in the MBR.

I think this because when you install over the MBR with something custom(eg. grub) then the Access IBM/ThinkVantage button that shows up during boot disappears.

[christopher_wolf]

It isn't necessarily in the MBR, since you can indeed install GRUB and maintain the functionality of the Access IBM Button. You just have to be very careful.

[Zedicus]

which could be done even if it was in the mbr. a clean install of windows can whipe the functionality of the key out... i thin its quite possible that it is set in the MBR. in theory you should be able to get grub set up to point to the hidden partition. i dont know how likely it would be to use that key to boot a linux install but i spose in theory pretty much anything is possible.

[yossarian]

It isn't necessarily in the MBR, since you can indeed install GRUB and maintain the functionality of the Access IBM Button. You just have to be very careful.

Hmm is there an article on how to do this? I would be keen to have a read. The only way I know how to get the stuff working is by dumping grub into the superblock of the partition instead of the mbr.