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I recently contacted IBM support because I needed to restore my original Windows
2000 as distributed with my ThinkPad T23 and the hidden "restore" partition
was damaged in such a way that the restore program would not go to completion.
IBM's solution was to send me some recovery CDs (case 21TSS8L) and that worked almost
100%. (I'll deal with the "almost" later.) Since the hidden partition
was damaged anyway and since I now had read-only media, I took the opportunity to
do some experimenting.
The objective was to allow for running more than one operating system on the
ThinkPad. I know that is not strictly supported by IBM but I know many people do
it successfully, running a combination of Windows, OS/2, Linux and possibly others.
There are many ways to boot an operating system of choice once it is installed.
Some methods that spring to mind are:
1. IBM's Boot ManagerThe real problem is that the T23 comes pre-loaded with Windows occupying the entire hard drive (apart from the restore partition) and there is no room to install any other operating system.
2. Linux's GRUB
3. AiRBoot from NetLabs
4. PQBoot by PowerQuest
The easiest solution is to use a program like PowerQuest's Partition Magic to
shrink the Windows partition, creating free space for other purposes. However with
a bit of effort I managed to achieve the same thing without using any third-party
tools and this note describes how.
In my case, I was installing OS/2. Essentially the same procedure applies for
Linux; the only difference would be the tools used and the way the partitions are
formatted.
My objective was (approximately):
and the trick was to get the restore program to limit itself to the first 19 gigabytes of the hard drive. The essential steps were:
NTFS
Windows 2000
19 GiB
FAT32
Shared data
5 GiB
JFS
OS/2 data
19 GiB
HPFS
OS/2 system
2 GiB
(If using IBM's Boot Manager, it is convenient to update Windows 2000 between steps 6 and 7 otherwise Windows 2000 will corrupt BM and render the system unbootable. If Boot Manager isn't being used then this step can be deferred.)
1
Delete all partitions (except the restore partition if that is to be retained).
2
Create a 19 GiB partition at the beginning of free space.
3
Create logical partitions of the desired sizes occupying the rest of the disk.
4
Format the extended partitions to some file system unknown to Windows.
5
Delete the primary partition.
6
Run the restore program.
*
Update Windows 2000 to SP2 or later.
7
Install the second operating system to its target partition. Also install the multi-boot control software.
8
Format the remaining partitions.
I tried several variations of this procedure, but the sequence listed above is the only one I found which worked. The restore program is fairly predatory in that it will grab unassigned disk space, primary partitions, unformatted partitions and partitions in formats understood by the Windows 98 setup program but it will respect extended partitions in alien formats. In my case, I did all the partitioning with LVM (IBM's Logical Volume Manager) by booting from my OS/2 installation CD. I actually created three volumes in the extended partition as outlined above and did a quick format of each to HPFS. Only after Windows 2000 was installed did I format the 5Gb partition as FAT32. Then I deleted the OS/2 system volume and re-created it as a primary partition during OS/2 installation. If you were setting up to run Linux then you could use Linux fdisk, cfdisk or Disk Druid to make ext2, ext3, jfs or reiserfs partitions.
It is OK to omit step 5 so long as the primary partition is unformatted or is
FAT32.
As I said earlier, it would have been easier if I had Partition Magic but I
hope this information is of use to others who do not have that particular tool
and who wish to do more with their ThinkPads.