[Techtalk] report on shiny new Thinkpad, or, Windows sux worse than ever

[Carlo Hamalainen]

On Fri, Jul 11, 2003 at 10:13:18PM -0700, Carla Schroder wrote:
> First off, there are NO software CDs included. Nada. zero. Zip. None. Not 
> even a recovery CD. There is a recovery partition on the hard drive, oh 
> that's a good idea. :P However IBM will ship a recovery CD, free, on request.

Except for IBM Australia who want $AU82 for it! I didn't feel like
paying again for software that I already had to pay for without really
wanting to. :-/

On my new T40 I did the following to resize the partition:

1. Boot up and hit the Access IBM blue button (i.e. go to the bios
screen).

2. Select restore to factory settings (or factory restore, whatever).
This will create a FAT32 partition.

3. As it reboots for the second phase of recovery, hit the IBM blue
button again and boot up your Linux CD. You should now see a FAT32
partition, and can easily resize it with most partitioning tools.
Install Linux at this point, and be careful not to let it reboot back
into the recovery process.

4. Reboot again, and the recovery process should recover to the smaller
FAT32 partition. Let this run, and you should end up with a dual boot
system.

> I tried creating a partition to install windows on, 
> leaving room for a Linux install, and the damn recovery CD ate the whole hard 
> drive. 

Hmm. Perhaps the recovery-from-CD is different to
recover-from-partition.

Another option is to get Partition Magic, which can allegedly resize
NTFS partitions. I tried, and had it crash half way through the
resizing/shuffling process, giving me a small heart attack.

Some useful URLs:

http://www.w-m-p.com/linux-on-t40.html
http://www-3.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/MIGR-48NT8D.html

-- Carlo (who is waiting for support for the wireless card, modem, and
better acpi)