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

Evan Heidtmann clydefrog at adnap.no-ip.com
Fri Jul 29 20:15:08 UTC 2005


On Fri, 2005-07-29 at 12:46 -0400, Rogan Creswick wrote:
> 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

That's the "Rescue and Recovery" partition, and I'm pretty sure I didn't
blow it away. The partition still exists and I can sort-of boot it from
GRUB (but it ends in an incomprehensible windows-style error message)

> 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.

The blue button now gets me into the BIOS, but it used to get me into
the predesktop area.

It's good to hear you say the restore discs should still work. I think
that's what I'll do, if I can't find a copy of the original MBR
somewhere.

Thanks,
Evan

> 
> --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
> > 
> > 
> > _______________________________________________
> > PLUG mailing list
> > PLUG at lists.pdxlinux.org
> > http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
> >
> _______________________________________________
> PLUG mailing list
> PLUG at lists.pdxlinux.org
> http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug




More information about the PLUG mailing list