[ltp] Need a crash course on T60 boot loaders, SVP

[Paul Fisher]

James PEARSON wrote:
> Where is the boot loader installed on T60s... and how is it setup???
> 
> The reason that I am asking is that my T60's hard drive is a Seagate Momentus 7200.1 SATA-100 that I
> installed myself. It dual booted openSUSE 10.2 and windows fine - until yesterday, that is, when I inadvertently
> deleted the hidden IBM partition - and since that I can't boot. 
> 
> This obviously means that the boot manager (grub in my case) was installed in the boot sector of the the hidden
> partition (i.e. custom boot partition)
> 
> Since then I have reinstalled the boot loader to the following partitions
> - root partition
> - boot partition
> - master boot partition
> 
> None of the above choices have worked i.e my T60 won't boot. The obvious solution is to use my Thinkpad
> advantage CDs and restore everything but I would first like to understand but is going on here.

I use Ubuntu, and found that in the installation, the "hidden" boot
partition wasn't hidden at all, it was just a standard FAT32 partition
that doesn't get auto mounted in Windows.  This is different than on the
T40, where I think the boot partition was actually hidden from all
operating systems - when I performed the same install steps, I just saw
about 3 GB of empty space at the end of my hard drive.

I have the boot loader set up to the MBR of the hard drive itself, and
the IBM recovery partition shows up on my menu.lst (It showed up as
"Windows 2000/NT/XP", but I edited the title).  Unfortunately, this
doesn't let the computer boot straight to the recovery partition with
the Access IBM - er - ThinkVantage button, but instead loads GRUB as if
you had never pressed it.

I would run the ThinkVantage CDs to reset your system, and reinstall the
Linux.  You could always use a LiveCD to recover your data to a USB hard
drive.

Hope this helps!
- Paul