[ltp] Laptop dead after trying to backup C drive (sata) using Acronis True Image, help SVP

[Theodore Tso]

On Sun, Dec 03, 2006 at 10:35:18PM -0500, James Knott wrote:
> > Actually I think most of the ThinkPads we've gotten in the last few
> > years come with a FAT32 drive.  When you boot it, one of the first
> > things it does is run the FAT32 to NTFS converter.  I've always been
> > kind of curious why they couldn't do that at the factory, but hey.
> 
> If it's like my R31, it isn't installed at the factory.  It's built on
> first use from the install partition and XP installs to FAT, then
> converts to NTFS.  If you bought the retail version, you'd have to
> manually convert to NTFS.

Actually, I believe what's going on is that no one has updated the
program which sets up the windows partition from the highly compressed
rescue/service partition.  And just to keep everyone sane, the folks
at Lenovo (and previously at IBM's Personal Computing Division) only
wanted to maintain one system for setting up the Windows XP system
with all of their customizations (i.e., all of the vendor-specific
applications, et. al.)  So the system you get when you get the hard
drive from the factor, and the system you get when you tell the
service partition that you've completely FUBAR'ed your windows disk
and need to restore it to factory condition, are one and the same, and
probably the person who wrote that code (either at Microsoft or IBM
PCD) left the company long ago and no one has wanted to mess with it.
So it's simpler to format a FAT partition, install Windows XP and all
of the customization packages on FAT, and then on the first boot,
convert it over to FAT.

I generally will mount the filesystem using Linux and disable the
filesystem coverter (see http://thunk.org/tytso/linux/t40.html) for
more details; it seems to work on the T60p as well, mainly because I
don't trust the NTFS implementation under Linux, and I use Windows
rarely enough (and only as a backup system when something has gone
wrong) that I don't mind the performance hit of leaving it running
using a FAT partition.  I haven't run into any problems yet, but I
imagine this probably won't work so smoothly on when Vista comes
out....

						- Ted