Hi everybody,

I'm in the process of getting a Slackware installation humming on this T42p, but I can't seem to get it to boot how I want it to. I wanted to keep the access IBM button during preboot so that I can access the system restore and recovery partition, and I found a source online telling me that this CAN be done. First off, the guy is using Suse, as well as GRUB. As far as I know, these two problems are not incredibly serious. After going through installation, I select the option to install lilo to the root partition. After I finish up, I set the boot partition I made to be bootable, chrooted into the new installation, but upon inspection of lilo.conf, it had been set to boot from /dev/hda6 (which is my root partition) when my boot partition is /dev/hda3 (I heard that it needed to be on a primary partition to work). I changed this, ran /sbin/lilo, and tried to restart. upon restart I got an error message saying that there is no operating system. I've been running through every last piece I can think of on this machine, and I have been unable to find what needs to be changed. Does anyone have an idea of what the problem could be here? At this point I am tempted to just fark the preboot partition, install lilo to the MBR, and simply do rescue and restore on this from the set of cds I burnt before even beginning.

Thank You

If you don't get an answer here at LQ, you might try posting your questions at the thinkpads.com forum. Linky: http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewforum...f72126d75f2221

-Surfrider

I've a T41 dual booting XP and Slackware 10.2 with the 2.6.13 kernel, and I've comfortably lived without the recovery area since I bought the ThinkPad first with SuSE and latterly with Slackware. My attitude to the recovery partition is that it was a complete waste of 3.5GB on my HD, especially given IBM are too cheap to provide recovery CDs unless you ask for them.

I used PartitionMagic in Windows to zap the recovery partition and then partition the 60GB drive in two with 30GB for XP and 30GB free space to be assigned to Linux. I then used fdisk on the Slackware install CD to partition a 1GB Swap and two Linux partitions of 15GB, one for root and the other as /home. This gives more flexibility when reinstalling or testing kernels, without overwriting personal data and apps. Lilo installed to the MBR has not caused me a problem.

Personally I would go down your proposed route of binning the recovery partition and reinstalling Slackware, storing lilo to the MBR. This will be a quicker and possibly less fraught solution in the long run. Should you ever need to reinstall XP you will have to do so from the recovery media. Be aware that from my experience this will format the entire hard drive and restore the recovery partition.

The only point of slight concern I have about your post is that it appears you may have burnt recovery CDs from the HD. If that's the case I would personally prefer to have the official set from IBM. You can order CDs from IBM for free within 90 days of purchase. After that period they will charge you.

Good luck and enjoy Slackware!

Regards,

dkpw

I'm prone to agree with you dkpw, but I still can't manage to get over the fact that I paid for these things, even if I don't really plan to need them. The other fact remains that once I dump the rescue and recovery and ditch using XP, that little blue button is going to just be sitting there. I know there are some tpb patches that will allow me to put a function onto it, but I can do that whether or not the preboot partition is there, and I kind of like the idea of having an onboard partition that's whole purpose is diagnostics and recovery. In the end, I think my whole problem getting the system to boot, has to be my rudimentary knowledge of lilo. I have a couple of questions that I still haven't found a satisfactory answer to:

1) I've set up the partition scheme so that the boot is a primary partition, and the swap and root are logical partitions. I think I'm supposed to set the primary boot partition as bootable in the partition table, as well as boot in lilo.conf, but that isn't working. Is that right? or should I simply cut the freespace up between a swap and a root and set the lilo up to boot from the root?

2) I've read a little about the lba32 option in lilo.conf, but I don't know if this applies to the situation or not. The linux partition is definitely past 1024, but I can't find whether this is still a problem in lilo or not. is lba32 the presesnt solution to this issue?

Those are really the issues I need to figure out what I will do next.

Thanks all

Ok, I refuse to give up on this, because I feel like I'm simply missing something very simple here to fix it. I've read about copying the linux boot sector info to boot.ini, but that seems like an unnecessary step to have to use the windows bootloader to access the linux bootloader, and a dependency I don't want to rely upon. Can anyone give me some insight into what might be causing this problem?

P.S. I've also just for the hell of it attempted doing a bare bones reinstall with XP and the preboot, and just a root and swap on primary partitions, and I still get the same result. I've seen that the lilo in slackware at this time puts the lba32 option in as default, so I can't think it's a problem of the location of the partitions on the hard disk. The only other thing I can think of is that I resized my partitions using QTParted on Knoppix, and I've heard that there are (occasionally) problems using it, but that also might have been with an older version. I'm left just scratching my head!

Hi bl0tt0

If you post your partitioning scheeme together with your lilo.conf it's easier to see if you've made some "simple" mistake.

Ok, I've tried many different partitioning schemes as well as lilo configurations, but the one I tried unsuccessfully most recently goes as follows:

partitioning scheme on an 80 GB Hard Drive

/dev/hda1 Windows NTFS 12GB
/dev/hda2 IBM_PRELOAD FAT32 ~5GB <----*note* this is at the very end of the hard disc
/dev/hda3 Linux swap 512MB
/dev/hda4 Linux / Reiserfs3 fills the rest of the drive

The lilo.conf goes
#global
boot=/dev/hda4
lba32 (I tried entering the lba32 option, even though I've seen that it's supposed to be default by now)

#linux
root=/dev/hda4
Label=Linux
the rest seems unimportant, but know that the info for Windows XP is there as well.

Hi again bl0tt0.

Have you tried with something like?

image = /boot/vmlinuz
root = /dev/hda4
label = Slackware
read-only

(I.e. specifying your boot image and the read-only option)

Another idea is if you've made sure that reiserfs is compiled into your kernel?

Could you also please post again your current error message when trying to boot?

Two things:

1. Open up a terminal session and post the output of "fdisk -l" (note that's a lowercase L). This will list some basic information about how your drive is actually partitioned, which may or may not match your lilo.conf

2. As you stated, that hidden partition is all the way at the back of the drive, and you don't really want or need to include it in lilo.conf because you won't be mounting it. In other words, just consider that the 80G drive is only 75G in size, and partition it so that you only define 75G of space -- just pretend that the hidden partition doesn't exist. -- J.W.

Ok, let me lay out the real hairy details of this as best I can...

fdisk layout (this is after having resized the windows partition using QTParted off of Knoppix.):

Device Boot Start End Blocks ID System
/dev/hda1 1 1567 12586896 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda2 9127 9729 4838400 12 Compaq diagnostics (This is the IBM Preloader)
/dev/hda3 1568 1568 8032+ 82 Linux Swap
/dev/hda4 * 1569 9126 6070963583 83 Linux



I used the simple installation of lilo initially, but even playing around with it didn't seem to help:


boot=/dev/hda4
message=/boot/boot_message.txt
prompt
timeout=1200

change-rules
reset

vga=773

#The windows XP Pro info was right here, but I've commented it all out until I get linux booting

image=/boot/vmlinuz
root=/dev/hda4
label=Linux
read-only

That's the info I have at the moment, word for word. The problem is that after I set up fdisk like above and run lilo, and reboot it, I get the IBM bootsplash, then the screen goes blank and "Missing Operating System" appears at the top of the screen. I know that the kernel has Reiserfs enabled, because I installed the basic bare.i kernel to start out with, and it's definitely in the configuration. I wonder if there isn't some kind of confusion about the exact location of the bootloader between IBM's BIOS and my linux partition.


Thanks again for all of the help

Hmm - the output from fdisk is unusual. Ordinarily the start/end sectors go in order, and from the description you've provided, I'd expect to see
Note the different partition numbers that I'd expect to see.

Either way, your boot parameter should be a device, not a partition. In other words, change "boot=/dev/hda4" to "boot=/dev/hda". The Linux section of lilo.conf looks OK otherwise. As you know, any time you edit lilo.conf, you need to rerun /sbin/lilo in order for them to take effect -- J.W.

Have you tried installing lilo to MBR (boot=/dev/hda in lili.conf)?

Should not mess up your recovery possibility and you can restore MBR with "fdsik /mbr" or directly from within windows XP recovery console.

First off, to J.W. Yeah, the partition scheme does seem odd, but it is because IBM Thinkpads come with two partitions to start out with. One is the basic Windows XP area that starts out as FAT32 and is then converted to NTFS, and the other is the IBM System Restore and Recovery area that you are supposed to be able to hide from a loaded operating system in the BIOS so that it doesn't get overwritten by accident. It seems that linux and fdisk are a little bit smarter than windows in that sense, because it is seen regardless. In any case, the recovery partition was installed at the very end of the hard disc, and I decided to resize the NTFS partition in order to make room for linux. QTParted did the jo just fine, but it means that hda1 and hda2 are now on opposite ends of the hard drive, while hda 3 and 4 got built between them as I was installing Slackware. Do you think that this could be one of the problems?

As far as switching the boot parameter to the device instead of the partition, it was my understanding that this would mean that lilo would be written to the MBR, which was something I was hoping to avoid doing, because I have read that this will disable the access IBM button on the Thinkpad at boot time, so it's no longer possible to boot into the rescue partition and use the diagnostic tools should something go wrong. Maybe this is no longer how the system operates, but I would definitely like to be sure of that before I go razing the MBR. I would really like to find out what is causing the problems that prevents the BIOS from seeing lilo on the Boot sector of hda4, but that's probably because I don't like to just give up on issues like these, and it seems like there are other people looking for a way to make this work as well.

All things being equal, however, I'm beginning to be tempted to just go ahead and put lilo where I'm sure it will work, and then maybe fix it later on. Having spent the past few years working on an OS X system really spoiled me from working on a Windows XP machine, and I'm already ready to migrate from XP after only 2 weeks of using it!

i'd guess that you need to figure out how to edit the windows bootloader. if that's what's sitting untouched on the MBR, it would still be pointing at your old partition scheme.

I'm not sure that installing lilo to the MBR makes a difference. I've got a T40 (likewise I had to deal with the same hidden partition issue) and during power-up, for about 2 or 3 seconds, you still have the chance to press the blue Access IBM button to get into the utilities, prior to lilo starting. Basically it's a lot like the same time duration you have to get into BIOS during startup. (Worst case, if you needed to clear your MBR, you could do it via the dd command) A lot of folks discourage installing lilo to the MBR, but for me, it's the only thing I've ever done and at least for me, it's never been a problem. Maybe I'm just lucky, who knows, but for the Linux/Windows dual boot systems I've set up, and I find the "lilo in the MBR" approach to work just fine.

Anyway, FWIW probably the best HOWTO I've seen on installing Linux on a Thinkpad is Fabrice Bellet's tutorial, which I found on Linux-Laptop.net. I'm biased because it's for a T40, but I suspect there still is a great deal of useful info in it. There are plenty of guides on Linux-Laptops as well, that may also be of interest.

As for the lilo issue, again, if I were you I'd try partitioning it in a more conventional way, and since the hidden partition is at the end of the drive, so long as you don't define space that intrudes upon that hidden area, you won't be touching it in any way, shape or form. My recommendation again would be to just treat that space as if it didn't exist, and omit any references to it in fstab since neither Slack nor Windows would ever have any need to refernence during normal operations. Good luck with it -- J.W.