[ltp] T21: fast booting and RFID errors

[Paul Phillips]

Strange things are afoot at the circle-K...

Some of you may recall my describing a very long period (upwards of sixty
seconds) with just the IBM logo during boots on my T21.  This condition,
which persisted through every change known to man, suddenly went away when
I blew away the first (factory) partition.  Now it boots very quickly.

I cannot imagine why this is.  I spoke with two people at IBM tech support
who had no idea either.  I'm not 100% sure that it was the partition
change that led to it, either, but whatever it was, this is much better.  
So if you also have a slow booting T21, have hope.

At around the same time (FWIW, this was all in the pursuit of getting a
properly partitioned, properly configured, properly hibernating dual-boot
win2k/linux system together) I rebooted and suddenly got this.  The error
code is right but the text is from my possibly fallible memory...

  0189: Invalid RFID Configuration Storage Area

...and let me tell you, I was distressed.  I couldn't boot off other
media, this message came up no matter what.  I scoured the BIOS for some
way to make it go away, and found one lone mention of RFID that clearly
had little to do with this.  And the message was terrifyingly similar to
the TP240 message you get when lm_sensors eats your EPROM:

  TP240 message is "0188: Invalid RFID Serialization Area"

claims www.linux-thinkpad.org.  I hadn't touched lm_sensors, this had all
happened in the course of installing Win2K onto the first partition.

Fearing the worst, I called IBM.  First lady incredibly unhelpful.  "We
don't support dual boot systems." Uh, I'm not asking you to support it,
I'm asking you how to make this RFID message go away.  "That's a software
problem." I hang up and call back to get someone else.  Take two is much
better.  Turns out if I do the RFID BIOS thing I was doing, then reboot to
see the 0189 error, then push "ESC", it gets bypassed and boots! The
screen just says "push F1 for Setup" so you have to guess ESC, or know.

I assume everyone knows what they're talking about when they say the
machines hosed by lm_sensors are permanently hosed, but mine sure acted
like the same chip was hosed, yet, wasn't.  May all your mileages vary
in the right direction, should they vary at all.

-- 
Paul Phillips      | Cleanliness is next to cleanlimbed.
In Theory          | 
<paulp@go2net.com> | 
ha! spill, pupil   |----------* http://www.improving.org/paulp/ *----------

----- The Linux ThinkPad mailing list -----
The linux-thinkpad mailing list home page is at:
http://www.bm-soft.com/~bm/tp_mailing.html