booting into the hpa with grub

[johnchan]

I have installed grub into the mbr and I have a couple of questions:

1) does the product recovery cds revert EVERYTHING, including the mbr, partition tables, hpa, windows xp?

2) is there a way to use grub to get into the hpa? the access ibm button does not work

3) the recovery media is actually the boot disk for R&R correct?

4) how can i restore the original mbr with ibm's diskette utility if i don't have a diskette drive? is there another way?

5) what will happen after I restore the mbr, will the linux partition be inaccesible?

thanks

[kaiser]

2) is there a way to use grub to get into the hpa? the access ibm button does not work

easy one. just copy the Windows XP entry in the menu.lst and change the partition number to the right one for the HPA.

[smugiri]

1) does the product recovery cds revert EVERYTHING, including the mbr, partition tables, hpa, windows xp?

It depends
- if you have a HDD without partitions, it deletes everything ( which is nothing since the disk is blank ) and creates a factory fresh disk with HPA and Windows in a drive that takes up all available disk. It makes a partition table with entries for the HPA and the OS only. Note that the HPA has many parts (PSAs) as documented here.
- if you have a partition in the disk marked as C, it simply re-installs the OS and does nothing else. It DOES NOT install a MRB and does not monkey with the partition tables unless you give it permission to when it asks. You must install a MBR manually or your machine will seem to hang at boot. Instructions on how to do that can be found below.
- if you have a partiion that is not marked C then I have no idea what happens ( i have re-installed in the fist 2 scenarios but never in the third ). It does not automatically delete these partitions though. Remember that since the product recovery disks use a process designed back in the 20th century, it does not like large disks with more than 32 gb since it does not understand the paritioning on them ( it understands FAT32 but not NTFS, this is the reason that the first part of the product recovery that is also responsible for partitioning only installs the HPA from the recovery disks then hands over to a second process that installs the actual OS. This makes product recovery seems to take place twice when you do not do it from scratch on a hard disk with no partitions). It asks to fix the partition markers, be sure to say NO if you like your data and want to save it.

the recovery media is actually the boot disk for R&R correct?

Actually, I thought you could do this with just the Access IBM button ( which does not work for you ... ) but the media should allow you to do this. I have never tried it though.

how can i restore the original mbr with ibm's diskette utility if i don't have a diskette drive? is there another way?

Try this if you have WinXP or Windows 2000 boot disk, it does not matter which since any Windows 2K or XP disk will work:
Insert disk and boot
Go through F8 EULA and when prompted choose "Repair" install
Go into your Windows Install by Typing 1
Type admin password if you have one
At prompt, type "fixmbr" and follow the prompts.
Type exit when done to reboot into Windows

what will happen after I restore the mbr, will the linux partition be inaccesible?

Yes, it WILL be inaccessible. However, instructions on how to fix that from Windows can be found here. You must know the number/id of your linux partion though although you can use trial and error until you get it right. ( i.e. start at 1 and work your way up )