Thinkpads Forum

Posted: **Wed May 27, 2009 6:50 am**

After much persuasion and running of the live CD I am going to install Mint KDE on my X31 2673. As I'm not that tech-savvy, I am getting some help from a friend. He is convinced I should get rid of Windows XP altogether, but I suggested a dual-boot, as I am not sure what happens to all the IBM software that is installed once you have reverted to a different OS entirely? Would it be a matter of backing up all the files and then installing them later, or is it better to go to the Lenovo website and get what you need? Sorry if all this seems obvious, but I really like my Thinkpad, and I don't want to kill it!

Posted: **Wed May 27, 2009 7:10 am**

If you install Mint straight out of the box as is, it will overwrite your Master boot record with Grub, thus killing any chance to access the recovery partition via the Thinkvantage or F11 buttons. However, GRUB will put an entry in it's bootlist for XP, so once GRUB comes up you can then select XP and go about your business. If you want to install Mint and completely bypass any destruction of the MBR there is a way to do it, see this link and post back with questions;
http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.ph ... highlight=

Posted: **Wed May 27, 2009 8:32 am**

Why don't you do a compromise and make it a dual-boot?

I have my Thinkpad set up for Linux and Windows.

Posted: **Wed May 27, 2009 10:10 am**

Dual-boot is probably the way to go if you have space for two operating systems and are new to Linux. I have three on my T61: Arch Linux, Ubuntu, and Vista (and only 60GB).

As regards the IBM software, the recovery partition will still be bootable through GRUB as Harryc noted. However, you will want to make a set of recovery disks before you begin just on the off chance that something goes wrong, because there's no way to get the recovery partition back without them... I lost my recovery partition because I accidentally typed "/dev/sda1" instead of "/dev/sdb1" when I was trying to format a USB drive. Hopefully with your friend's help you won't make that mistake, and Mint is nothing like Gentoo.

Posted: **Wed May 27, 2009 10:57 am**

Thanks or all the prompt replies; most helpful. I will definitely go for dual -booting, as I don't wan't to lose the IBM tools, which I find really useful. I didn't think to ask before, but does the fact that I've only got a 40GB hdd (in reality 37.5GB) impact upon my dual-booting options? I have 23 GB free space. at present, and I seem to have no problem putting all my files onto a 1MB flash drive,. (admittedly no pic's and only a small selection of music so far) so I don't take up a lot of space file wise. Cheers guys.

Posted: **Wed May 27, 2009 1:04 pm**

Harryc wrote:If you install Mint straight out of the box as is, it will overwrite your Master boot record with Grub, thus killing any chance to access the recovery partition via the Thinkvantage or F11 buttons. However, GRUB will put an entry in it's bootlist for XP, so once GRUB comes up you can then select XP and go about your business. If you want to install Mint and completely bypass any destruction of the MBR there is a way to do it, see this link and post back with questions;
http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.ph ... highlight=

Harry. I think I may have done this when I installed my Ubuntu. On boot I don't have the F11 option for recovery. However when I run an fdisk -l report I see a FAT32 parition. When I'm on XP side I still see the IBM program to create recovery disks (not sure what the exact name is. I'm on Ibex).

Is there hope for me to get my F11 function back in??? I will know for sure if I am able to do a DVD/or CD burn later on this week. I ordered an external DVD/CD writer.

Posted: **Wed May 27, 2009 2:16 pm**

I have just installed opensuse on my X60s and have it dual booting with XP. I also have my Thinkvantage button in tact (i.e. it loads the recovery utilities when pressed during boot up) and my recovery partition. It all depends on which version rescue and recovery you have. If it's version 4 then it's real easy. It's what I had so that's what I'll describe.

My HDD was partioned with the XP partition at the front and the recovery partition at the end of the drive. i then shrunk the XP partition to the minimum I thought I could get away with without crippling XP completely. In the remaining space I created a 250MB /boot partition (mark it as active) and the rest was made as an extended partition. The extended partition was then partitioned into 20GB /root (ext3), 2 GB /swap and the rest as /home (ext3).

You then start your install and make sure you choose manual installation, it will find the partitons you just created and also ask where to install Grub. You must install it in your /boot partition. If you install it in you MBR you'll loose your ability to run the recovery from boot.

Once everything is installed edit your grub menu.lst and make sure that the /boot partition is active and that the windows partition is not set to makes itself active on boot up. When the system reboots you should be presented with the grub boot loader and your two OS choices.

Like I said this is for version 4 of R&R. If you have an earlier version then it will be slightly more complicated. Look at the Thinkwiki here for help.

Posted: **Wed May 27, 2009 5:30 pm**

If I read your original post correctly it seems you might be under the impression that IBM's drivers
and software, that one would normally download and use in Windows, will work in Linux as well
which is not the case.
This is why one should try as many of the various Linux distros as possible to find the one that
gives the most functionality in whatever model laptop one uses.
Good luck
Tim S

Posted: **Wed May 27, 2009 9:16 pm**

CyberDude wrote:I have just installed opensuse on my X60s and have it dual booting with XP. I also have my Thinkvantage button in tact (i.e. it loads the recovery utilities when pressed during boot up) and my recovery partition. It all depends on which version rescue and recovery you have. If it's version 4 then it's real easy. It's what I had so that's what I'll describe.
<snip>

I don't /think/ this setup is RnR 4 specific, but should work on any ThinkPad if you have enough space to resize the Windows partition.

I'd actually forgotten about this option (installing Grub on a /boot partition and making it bootable) because Windows Vista doesn't play nice with the bootable flags, but by all accounts it works fine with earlier versions of Windows.

Posted: **Thu May 28, 2009 11:00 am**

trent9008 wrote: I don't /think/ this setup is RnR 4 specific, but should work on any ThinkPad if you have enough space to resize the Windows partition.

Perhaps you're right. I was going by what was implied in the Thinkwiki. If it works with any version then even better. Didn't know Vista doesn't play ball though. Is that just another way for M$ to make things difficult for those that don't want to use a competing OS alongside? Hmmm...I wonder.

Posted: **Thu May 28, 2009 11:35 am**

trent9008 wrote:...I'd actually forgotten about this option (installing Grub on a /boot partition and making it bootable) because Windows Vista doesn't play nice with the bootable flags, but by all accounts it works fine with earlier versions of Windows.

Vista doesn't handle the Active flag any differently than any other Microsoft operating system. You can make the linux /boot partition Active and Vista won't care. GRUB boots Vista the same way it boots XP - just chainload to the first sector of the Windows partition:

Code: Select all

Title Vista
rootnoverify (hd0,x)
chainloader +1

Substitute the correct partition id for "x" in the above boot stanza. Your Linux distribution will probably set this up automatically when it installs GRUB.

Posted: **Thu May 28, 2009 11:45 am**

emeraldgirl08 wrote:Is there hope for me to get my F11 function back in??? I will know for sure if I am able to do a DVD/or CD burn later on this week. I ordered an external DVD/CD writer.

Based on experience and having read many threads here on the same topic, you will have to completely recover the machine to the factory image using the Rescue & Recovery CD's. This will erase all data and partitions on your drive. There is a MBR repair diskette that Lenovo has to repair the recovery MBR, but I have never seen it work correctly. You can try it though. When it runs it will destroy GRUB, so you may want to plan this carefully.

http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... MIGR-54483

Posted: **Sun May 31, 2009 12:23 pm**

k0lo wrote:Vista doesn't handle the Active flag any differently than any other Microsoft operating system. You can make the linux /boot partition Active and Vista won't care.

Not true. Windows Vista explicitly checks the bootable flags somewhere during the boot sequence, and if the Vista partition is not active it will change them. (If your experience is different, I'd love to find out how to turn off this "feature".)

GRUB boots Vista the same way it boots XP - just chainload to the first sector of the Windows partition:
...

True, but only if you can actually boot GRUB. This will work if GRUB is installed on the MBR or on the first bootable partition. The problem is that if you boot into Vista just once, GRUB will no longer be bootable and you have to run fdisk to change the flags before you can reboot into GRUB. XP doesn't have this problem.

Posted: **Sun May 31, 2009 4:19 pm**

trent9008 wrote:...Not true. Windows Vista explicitly checks the bootable flags somewhere during the boot sequence, and if the Vista partition is not active it will change them. (If your experience is different, I'd love to find out how to turn off this "feature".)...

Trent:

I don't think that Vista is changing the Active flag. I suspect it's GRUB that's changing it. What does your Windows boot stanza look like? Does it look like this:

title Windows Vista
root (hd0,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1

Most Linux distros add the makeactive statement to a Windows boot stanza, which will set the Active flag on the Windows partition when you boot into Windows. And executing makeactive makes a permanent change to the partition table.

If you want to leave the Active flag set on the Linux partition, delete the makeactive statement from your GRUB boot stanza.

I no longer have Vista on this laptop but I just tested this behavior with Windows 7, which shares the same booting mechanism as Vista. As far as I know there have been no substantive changes to the way Win7 boots compared with Vista. I used a disk editor to set the Active flag on the Linux partition and then rebooted the PC. When GRUB started I booted into Windows 7 and checked the Active flag again. It was still set on the Linux partition.

Here is a suggested GRUB boot stanza for Vista, assuming that it is on the first primary partition of the disk:

title Windows Vista
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1

Using root instead of rootnoverify on an NTFS partition is another common error in the default Windows boot stanza in a lot of Linux distros.

Posted: **Mon Jun 01, 2009 1:03 pm**

@kolo: Interesting. I'll check this out next time I have reason to use Vista. I can't remember what distro I was using when I was trying to do that. All the same, I'm surprised makeactive isn't better documented -- seems that it would be a more common problem than it is. I guess because most Linux distros install GRUB on the MBR by default.

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