I have installed Suse linux 9.1 on an IBM thinkpad R40 that had Win XP Pro preinstalled. Everything is fine (using the LILO), but a major problem is that I cannot access the ibm predesktop area any more. Pressing the Access IBM button just pops up a small blue window asking me whether I want to enter the Bios or boot from a device. It seems like the ibm hidden partition is erased. I should mention that I did not partition the disk before the Linux install, Linux just did this automatically for me during install. Using fdisk from a Shell does not appear any other partition than the Win Xp and the 2 linux (swap and root).
Please if anybody has a solution to this problem I would be very happy to know, because IBM did not ship any recovery cd, I should just use this partition that it seems to be lost..

I would use fdisk to determine whether or not the partition was removed. If you did a format of the HDD then yes the partition will be gone. Another way you can check is to go into the BIOS and then the security option. From there choose IBM Predesktop Area. Once in there go ahead and disable the partition so that it becomes unhidden from any OS there. If it is there you can then add it to LILO and boot to it. It uses Win98 to boot up into the Predesktop Area. If that does not work then the only way to get the OS back is to call into IBM and order a recovery CD unfortunately.