[PLUG] Thinkpad T42, Debian sarge, and the MBR

[Rogan Creswick]

On 7/29/05, Evan Heidtmann <clydefrog at adnap.no-ip.com> wrote:
> My thinkpad was delivered yesterday morning by a friendly man in a brown
> suit. I promptly installed Debian and put GRUB on the MBR. Dual boot now
> works well, but I cannot get into "IBM Rescue and Recovery" by pressing
> the "Access IBM" button during POST. Before the install, I could.

It sounds like you may have blown away the HPA partition:

http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/PreDesktop_Area

My guess is that the restore discs will put everything back to
out-of-the-box condition.

I put grub in the MBR on my T42 the day before yesterday, and just
popped into the bios this morning with the blue button, so that's
(probably) not the problem.

--Rogan

> 
> After discovering this, but before doing anything more, I booted to
> windows and burned the "IBM Product Recovery" CDs (7 CDs in total!)
> 
> It appears from reading other people's stories that the problem with
> booting IBM's special recovery application lies in replacing the
> factory-installed MBR with GRUB's MBR.
> 
> First question: does the netinst r0a debian-installer make a backup of
> the MBR? If so, how do I restore it?
> 
> Second question: Are those CDs I made likely to restore to factory
> condition, or might they fail partway through and leave me with no
> windows, no special partition, and no Debian?
> 
> Thanks for your help,
> Evan
> 
> 
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