[ltp] t21 won't boot after aborted install

[Phil Suh]

Ah yes. I'm a newbie and I'm afraid I've screwed things up.

I have a Thinkpad T21, with DVD drive, and 20 gig HD, Windows 2000.

I've been looking at installing linux for a long time, so after Mandrake
8.1 came out I decided to take the plunge.  I cleaned off the T21, backed up
all the data, and had a friend burn the Mandrake install disks.

The goal was to dual-boot win2k and mandrake.

I had a really old copy of Partition Magic (4.0) but rather than use it, I
assumed that I could use fdisk/disk druid to repartition the drive. I
didn't realize that creating new partitions, and resizing the one big
win2k partition, would wipe the drive.

Looking back, this seems like common sense. But when Disk Druid put up the
dialog, 'will wipe current data on partitions, are you sure?', i
inadvertently pressed 'OK'. I realized instantly what I had done, and in a
panic, disconnected the power and unplugged the battery, turning the
machine off.

(Yeah, stupid, I panicked.)

Anyway, I now have a Thinkpad that, when turned on, shows:
  1. the Bios screen (F1 for settings, F12 for alt-boot-device)
  2. then shows the "Loading Windows...  Press F8 for boot options"
  3. then shows in VGA the Windows2k splash screen.
  4. then blue screens to:
      *** STOP: 0x0000007B (0x814574B0, ......)
      INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE

It's obvious I have some sort of hard disk problem. I'm puzzled by the
fact that I can start booting into windows, but then it dies part-way. If
the master boot record was screwed up, I don't think it would even start.

I've attempted to fiddle with the BIOS so I can boot from my "Product
Recovery CD-ROM (IBM Thinkpad T21 MT 2647)". I can't get the BIOS to boot
from the DVD-ROM.

So my questions: if you were in my shoes,

  1. how would you go about getting the laptop fixed so it could boot
     into Win2k,

     1a. how does one get the bios to boot fro mthe recovery cd-rom?
     1b. will that enable me to run some sort of drive check
         ('CHKDSK /F')?

  2. and then subsequently, how to get this machine dual-booting linux?

Thanks for your time.

Phil



lrf v srry yvxr na vqvbg


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