[ltp] T30 on-disk recovery

[Richard Neill]

Geetings,

This has been standard for IBM for about 2 years. What you have is a 
recovery partition of about 1GB at the end of your disc. You may well 
never want to use it, in which case, just delete that partition 
(/dev/hda2 iirc). [If you ask IBM, they will send you a CDROM, should 
you need it.]

Otherwise, if you are happy to lose the 1GB of disk space, just go ahead 
and install linux anyway.

You can always boot the recovery partition using the linux bootloader 
(grub/lilo) - just add it as an extra option.

I installed Mandrake twice on this A22p which has such an option. The 
first time, I left the recovery partition alone. Then, later I decided I 
wanted the disc space more than I was likely to use W98 much again, so I 
  kept W98, but deleted the recovery partition.

In summary - this isn't nearly as bad as it sounds :-)

Best wishes

Richard


Seth Kulick wrote:
> Hello again all,
> 
> Well, just got the T30 today.  It comes with XP PRO installed, and I was
> expecting there to be a "recovery disk".  Apparently this one is even more
> "advanced", and the recovery info is included on the hard disk, with no
> recovery disk - "The Product Recovery program is in a section of your hard 
> disk drive that is not displayed by Windows Explorer".   Since I want to set it
> up with a dual boot with RH 7.3, this isn't exactly the sort of thing I want 
> to see.  I know people warned me about not overwriting the MBR during the
> Linux install so that a recovery disk can be used, but this looks like
> an additional layer of headache. Anybody have any experience with installing
> Linux with this recovery stuff on the drive?  Hopefully it won't interfere
> with splitting the main partition into two. (and did I ask for space on 
> my hard drive to be taken up with this?)
> 
> I'm tempted to just get a bootleg copy of XP, wipe out the whole thing, and
> start with a fresh install and then setup the dual boot.
> 
> thanks,
> 
> 
> Seth