[ltp] hidden recovery partition

[Fabrice Bellet]

Hey,

On Wed, Nov 05, 2003 at 01:17:25PM -0500, Greg Meyer wrote:
> On Wednesday 05 November 2003 11:00 am, Hartwig, Thomas wrote:
> > Anyone already has reliable informations about the hidden recovery
> > partition and its geometry data of the T40 line?
> >
> > Is it accessible/destroyable with fdisk?
> > Has it to be (de)activated in the bios?
> > Anybody managed it to burn it to CD, IBM support said to me there is the
> > tool "IBM Rapid Restore PC" RRPC in IBMTOOLS/APPS/RRPC which burns all
> > data to CD, but my quick test failed for somewhat reason?!
> > Anyone has pointers to some kind of documentation to it?
> >
> > Sorry for asking again perhaps, but there are always fragments of
> > answers and I want to clarify this thing.
> >
> Have you seen this document?
> 
> http://bellet.info/~bellet/laptop/t40.html#the_predesktop_area

About this page:

Unfortunately, I couldn't finish the work, and test the burned DVD on a real
blank hard disk to know if it does the right thing. If anyone, with a DVD
burner, and a spare disk, can provide feedback, please contact me.

What I obtain is a bootable DVD, that seems to contains all the required 
compressed data files, and the recovery program. It boots nicely on the 
thinkpad (It won't work on another machine, there must be some low level 
hardware check, to ensure that you're using this program really on a 
Thinkpad), and it asks you if you want to "reformat your hard disk and
install Windows XP, device drivers and preinstalled applications".

More reliable, there is a documented method to backup this protected
area on another machine, and to restore it on a fresh new hard disk. 
All the required information is available in a white paper from IBM. So 
I'm confident that this proposed method has been properly tested.

http://www-3.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?lndocid=MIGR-46023

Best wishes,
-- 
fabrice