[PLUG] Thinkpad OEM adventures

[Aaron Burt]

On Wed, 23 Jul 2003, Carla Schroder wrote:

> This may be helpful to some of you-
>
> Scenario: Shiny new IBM Thinkpad R32, <snip>
> Ok. Preloaded with XP Pro, which I want because my clients use it, so I
> probably ought to look at it or something. No software disks came with it.
> Nope not one. It has a sekrit recovery partition on the hard drive, which
> eats up about 1.5 gigabytes. I call and request a recovery CD, which they
> ship for free.

FYI, I had to set up a T30 as dual-boot recently.  There wasn't time to
get the recovery CD, and I felt better leaving the partition be.
I turned it on and the first thing it did on bootup was tell me it was
converting its FAT32 parition to NTFS.  Dang!

So I did the recovery procedure, and when it rebooted itself, I hit F12
and booted Rescue Mode from a Red Hat 9 CD.  I then used GNU PartEd to
shrink the FAT32 partition down by a few gigs (it properly resized the FS
and moved the data out of the way--woo!)  I rebooted and let Windows do
its silliness.  Once I was satisfied it was happy, I installed Linux in
the space I'd made.

> Moral: no matter how many scammy tricks microsoft tries to pull, no
> matter how chicken hardware vendors are to support Linux, our brilliant
> Linux programmers foil them again and again. Thank you very much, folks!

Indeed!