thinkpad R40 freebsd preperation questions...

[Dave Tweten]

jev at ecad.org said:
>I'm awaiting delivery of a IBM ThinkPad R40 2722, and I have a few
>questions in preparation for installing FreeBSD 5.1-RELEASE. 

>The unit is going to come with WinXP PRO pre-installed ...

I've done this on three ThinkPad T23s with Win2k Pro installed, so your 
mileage may vary.

>... I need to delete the main XP partition and create a new  smaller
>partition for XP.

>I have only heard of people using partition magic to do this, can I do
>this with fdisk, or other?

The short answer is "Yes."  I didn't want to buy a commercial partition 
munger to use just once, and no public domain package I could find would 
move the sectors Win2k had marked as fixed.  The "hidden" recovery 
partition (which isn't hidden to FreeBSD fdisk) occupies the last sectors 
of the disk and the second entry in the "slice" table.  That's a pain.  
The whole recovery partition idea is a pain.  What do you do when you are 
recovering from a disk crash?  Oh ...

Here's what I did.

1. Call IBM support and tell them you need a real recovery CD.
   They'll send you one completely free of charge.

2. Blow away everything on the hard disk.

3. Use FreeBSD fdisk to create a Window$ partition (maybe two,
   if you want both NTFS and FAT32 -- see below), a FreeBSD
   partition, and a hibernation partition.  See
   http://www.pc.ibm.com/qtechinfo/MIGR-4PESMK.html

4. Install the FreeBSD boot manager.

5. Install Windows from the recovery CD.  It will respect the
   limits of its partition and won't insist upon putting the
   fixed sectors outside.

6. Install FreeBSD (and maybe the boot manager AGAIN, if Windows
   is being particularly monopoli$tic that day).

7. Run forcedos stndalhd.exe to prepare the hibernation partition.

8. Maybe install the FreeBSD boot manager again.

You're done.

>Does this [Windows] partition have to be FAT32 or can I use NTFS? 

Either will work.  I'm told NTFS is easier under XP from IBM, but it was 
even possible under Win2k from IBM -- just a little hard.

Be aware, though, that if you want to mount your Windows partition under 
FreeBSD, a FAT32 partition is both readable and writable, but an NTFS 
partition is only readable.  One of my T23s had to protect Windows users 
from each other, so NTFS was a must.  On that machine, I made both an NTFS 
partition and a FAT32 partition, so I could mount both under FreeBSD and 
be able to write onto Windows-readable disk from FreeBSD.

>Has anyone had success with getting their reinstall CDs with out extra
>charge from IBM?

Me!  Me!

Good luck!
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