[ltp] SuSE 9.1 on Thinkpad, cont'd.

[Eben King]

I just succeed trying to boot my TP T40 with a stock (i.e., from
kernel.org, not SuSE) kernel.  Here's why there was a problem.

This (as do all(?) Thinkpads) has with a region on the disk you're not
supposed to get to, containing a compressed as-shipped image of the hard
drive.  This is done (I think) with a malformed partition table.  You can
restore the hard drive with the BIOS.  When I made additional partitions
with the SuSE 9.1 install DVD, it made (or allowed me to make, take your
pick) a noncompliant 4th partition, as shown below:

Disk /dev/hda: 26.8 GB, 26881188864 bytes
15 heads, 63 sectors/track, 55558 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 945 * 512 = 48340 bytes
  
   Device Boot      Start         End     Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1   *           1       27776   13124128+   7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda2           27777       38960    5289440   83  Linux
/dev/hda3           38961       40958     944055   82  Linux swap
/dev/hda4           40959       62016    9949905   83  Linux
 
Note it ends beyond what the partition table says is the last cylinder.  
SuSE's "official" kernel doesn't have a problem with this, but regular
kernels do.  What I did was boot SuSE, tar up /usr, delete the 4th
partition, then boot up System Rescue CD (highly recommended), recreate
the 4th partition ending on cylinder 55558, and untar the data into it.  
Moving its end from 62016 to 55558 shrank it from about 10 GB to 6.6 GB;
I'll shuffle things around eventually.


-- 
-eben    ebQenW1@EtaRmpTabYayU.rIr.OcoPm    home.tampabay.rr.com/hactar
TAURUS:  You will never find true happiness - what you gonna
do, cry about it?  The stars predict tomorrow you'll wake up,
do a bunch of stuff and then go back to sleep.  -- Weird Al