R40 (2897) harddrive puzzle - upgrade impossible?

[guttapercha]

Hello,

As many of you know, the R40 did not come with restore discs thus the OS/drivers are only available on the predesktop area. The omission on the part of IBM to include the OS that I legally own, on a lousy CD has already caused me to waste 12+ hours trying to solve this.

I am trying to upgrade to a larger HD. I had no success copying the predesktop area with a linux utility. I also simply tried installing a different copy of Xp on the new drive, but then I couldn't get my wireless to work - IBM doesn't make the drivers for the 2897 model available.

So, I'm back to square one.

Has anybody successfully upgraded the harddrive in an R40?

Thanks,

JD

[vanaya]

I did, but I had a hdd adapter that i just cloned everything to.

I do have the original set of recovery cd's from ibm. Ofcourse I had to pay the 45 bucks to get them. On the cd's they say they are for type 2681, 2682, 2683, 2722, 2723, 2724. Mine was 2896, customer service they would still work. I bought them and didn't have a problem.

I can make you a copy of them for the shipping fee only. If your interested PM me.

[guttapercha]

You've got mail. Thanks!

[Terrahawk]

Also if you're able to reserve a 5 GB partition on your existing hard drive, I managed to extract the programs (from the hidden partition) that allow you to back up the hidden partition.

Yes, I ran into this problem last year when I bought my R40. I managed to back up the hidden partition and write it to a bootable DVD, which was then able to restore it to my new hard drive.

If you still want a hidden partition, let me know and I'll email you the restore and backup programs.

[Terrahawk]

When I wanted to upgrade the 20GB hard drive that came with my R40, I couldn't figure out how to do it either since the original install image was stored in the hidden partition. I found the IBM Hidden Protected Area (HPA) white paper (it's a PDF file) via Google after a while and it includes instructions on how to backup and restore the HPA. However, I did not have a floppy drive and so I had a most difficult time obtaining the fwbackup.exe and fwrestor.exe files.

The procedure I followed to obtain them, and back up the HPA is this:
- back up all data you want to keep on the original drive.
- repartition the drive so that it has a 5GB FAT32 partition, and the rest as NTFS.
- Install Windows XP onto the NTFS partition, either from an OEM XP CD or it might work if you just do a restore by pressing the Access IBM button upon startup. I used the XP CD since it is a lot easier to control where the install goes. You don't need the IBM drivers for what I wanted to do, the default XP ones are fine.
- Reboot, press Access IBM on startup and run PC Doctor. Exit PC Doctor and it should leave you in DOS.
- Copy the FWRESTOR.EXE and FWBACKUP.EXE files from the HPA onto the 5GB FAT32 partition.
- Run FWBACKUP.EXE as per the HPA PDF file and make sure the destination is the 5GB FAT32 partition. Wait about 1-2 hours for the operation to complete. I suggest that you don't do this on battery power.
- Reboot to XP, connect the R40 to a network and copy the backed-up HPA, FWBACKUP.EXE and FWRESTOR.EXE files to another computer, preferably one with a DVD writer. I don't know how you'd do the next step with only writable CDs since the HPA is about 5 CDs in size.
- Make a bootable Win98 DOS (you need FAT32 support) DVD, ensuring that the bootable DVD loads a CD/DVD-ROM device driver or else you can't read the contents of the DVD. Make sure that this DVD contains the HPA backup files, FWBACKUP.EXE and FWRESTOR.EXE. I just made a bootable floppy that loaded a DOS CD-ROM driver and used Nero to make my bootable DVD from that.
- Install the new hard drive into the R40 and boot from your freshly created DVD.
- Make sure that the HPA is enabled in the BIOS, and not set to Secure (i.e. you want to write to it).
- Run FWRESTOR.EXE as per the HPA PDF file and wait while it writes a new hidden protected area.
- Reboot the R40 and press Access IBM at the appropriate time. It should go straight to the new HPA if everything has worked.

And yes, I kept my restore DVD because I expect that I may need to upgrade my hard drive again in the future

I just thought I'd post these instructions since I already wrote them out for someone who asked me via private message, and it's be a shame not to include them on here for everyone to see. Oh yes, if you want a copy of the IBM HPA white paper, let me know and I can email it to you if you can't find it via a search engine.

[guttapercha]

Thanks so much for the additional info. I was under the impression that the restore disks would create everything I need on a new hard drive, including the HPA. If that is not the case, then I will try to add the extra partition and do as you say as well.

Actually, I tried using an XP install disk as part of this process and had issues with the Intel 802.11b mini-PCI driver that Lenovo has on their site. My hope is that the restore disc set will include the appropriate driver.

I appreciate your addition to this,

JD

P.S. I did find that white paper, but had some difficulties with the floppy. A friend of mine has the dock and a floppy but we couldn't get it to work.

[Terrahawk]

The restore CDs do not add the hidden partition back. I have a set, and have found that out for myself.

[guttapercha]

Good to know, Geoff. Then what I'll do is leave 5 GB unpartitioned, Use the restore discs on the NTFS partition, and then do as you say to recreate the HPA.

Gracias,

JD

[Terrahawk]

One thing you can do if you don't want to reserve the 5GB permanently is to install the HPA, then wipe out all partitions on the disk. After that, use the HPA to restore the operating system install. That way, you won't need to hold 5GB for the HPA backup files.

[guttapercha]

Geoff,

I have a couple of questions about your method. Could you clarify a couple of things for me?

When you partition the original disk into the 5GB FAT32 and the rest NTFS, how do you avoid creating those partitions over the HPA? Won't the HPA just appear as unallocated space, thus be seen as available for partitioning?

Where did you get a DOS CD-rom driver that works with the thinkpad's CD-drive for making your bootdisk?

Thank you again,

JD

[Terrahawk]

In the BIOS under "Security", you can enable or disable the HPA. You can even write-protect the HPA to prevent unwanted updates. When you install a brand new disk, it has no HPA on it. Enabling the HPA in the BIOS reserves about 4GB or so of the disk and removes it from all availability to normal operations - i.e. it is like your new drive has shrunk 4 GB or thereabouts in size. My R40's original 20GB disk showed up as a 15.6 GB disk and nothing any partitioning software could do could change that. Somehow, the Thinkpad accesses this and stores its recovery and diagnostics data in there.

So once enabled in the BIOS, you can partition to your heart's content without any fear of overwriting the HPA.

As for CD-ROM drivers, I just googled for "DOS CD-ROM driver". Any IDE CD-ROM driver will work. If I recall correctly, the one I used was for an Oak CD-ROM drive and my Thinkpad has a Hitachi-LG CDRW/DVD drive.

[guttapercha]

The install discs provided by Vic did the job! Thank you thank you thank you!! The discs install an HPA on the new disc. Then, the HPA installs the OS from the on a FAT32 partition that its utility creates during the install process. Once the OS is in, windows converts the Fat32 partition to an NTFS partition.

I couldn't get Terrahawk's technique to work unfortunately.

Thanks again all for the help,

JD

[vanaya]

Glad to see that the disks worked for you . I am almost positive that the disks created an HPA on my new drive. But I can't confirm that right now as it is sitting on my desk at work.

[Béèm]

I have a R40 also and I see the talk about a hidden partition.
Now I have the NTFS one from origin and created that rapid restore one. Is this last one that hidden partition? (it is hidden anyway from XP, but not from Linux)

Also with gparted from Linux it indicated a 3GB free space which wasn't used apparently. Is it ok to use it or is this that hidden partition?

Thanks for answers.

[guttapercha]

Supposedly only the thinkpad's bios will protect the hpa, so when you connect a hd to a non-thinkpad, the hpa will appear as unutilized space.

[Terrahawk]

In my experience, creating a HPA on an IBM will cause the area to become invisible to any machine because the mechanism with which it does it is to tell the drive to under-report its size.

Example:
I got a 40GB hard drive from an old HP nx series laptop and it did not have a HPA installed. I set it up in my R40 and the available space went from 37 GB down to about 32GB. At some stage, I upgraded to my 60GB drive and I removed the 40GB drive and put it into a Compaq Armada M500. The full 37GB was not available, and the only way I could recoved it was to run Seagate's DiscWizard (it was a Seagate drive) and tell it to report the drive's full size once again.

As far as I know, this style of hidden partition stopped being used after the R40/T40/X31/etc. and the normal separate yet visible partition method started being used, which can be seen using linux or fdisk.