T42, repartitioning and system restore

[skuehne]

Greetings,

After repartitioning the first primary partition (C:) of my new Thinkpad T42 into two primary partitions (C: and D:), pressing the blue Access IBM button during boot to access the system recovery utility doesn't work anymore. Instead I'll get a "Missing operating system" message.

The hidden recovery partition never got touched or moved during the repartitioning.

I think that there must a link (in the BIOS?, the MBR?) pointing to the second primary partition, which used to be the hidden system restore partition before it got bumped to third by the repartioning. That's why I'm getting the 'Missing operating system' message (because the new second partition is data only)

I called IBM Support but their response was somewhat unsatisfactory/clueless. How can I fix this? I assume that IBM does not do something kludgy like hardcoding the pointer to the system restore partition in their BIOS.

Well, accessing the BIOS via F1 works just fine, and I don't have any problems booting or running the machine. I'd just like to get this working 'as advertised'.

Thanks for your help!

Sven

[Zeitgeist]

http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.ph ... access+ibm

http://www-1.ibm.com/support/docview.ws ... &loc=en_US

[skuehne]

Thanks! This is exactly the information I was looking for!

I wonder why that guy from IBM's support line didn't point me to that page. He was more than clueless and it appeared he never even heard the word MBR before. He couldn't even imagine that someone wants to have separate partitions for programs and data. Sad ...

Maybe I should have bought an 2378 instead of the 2379 ;-)

Thanks again for the link!

Sven

[Zeitgeist]

Thanks! This is exactly the information I was looking for!



Thanks again for the link!

Sven

Thank you for your kind reply, good luck!

[skuehne]

Just to follow-up on this - it worked perfectly! Booted the restore disk from a USB floppy drive, 5 min later everything was fine ;-)