Thinkpad Hidden Partition & MBR

[George Hartzell]

Thomas Beer writes:
 > Dear All,
 > 
 > I consider buying an T41 or T42.  [...]
 > Any experiences installing FBSD on
 > a recent T4x with a hidden partition?

I just bought a T42p, with Windows XP, it spends most of it's time
running FreeBSD5.3BETA3.

The restore partition isn't hidden any more, it's a normal partition
of type "Compaq diagnostics".

I spent a lot of time trying different setups in the [apparently vain]
hope of getting s4bios suspend to work.  I'd done enough research to
learn that the bios will support suspend-to-disk, but apparently not
if you're using an ACPI aware OS [e.g. FreeBSD booted w/ ACPI].  If I
boot w/out ACPI, the bios will suspend to disk for me, w/ ACPI gives
no joy.

Some notes:

  - for the bios-managed suspend-to-disk to work, you need to give the
    bios a place to put it's data.  With some constraints, it seems
    that it can either be a suspend-to-disk-file in a FAT partition,
    or a suspend-to-disk-partition.  There's an app on the IBM web
    site that will build the suspend-to-disk-file for you (it also
    claims to build a suspend-to-disk-partition, but other IBM pages
    warn that it doesn't work and that seems to be true).  Or, you can
    use a linux-y app, lphdisk, to format a suspend-to-disk-partition
    once you've created it with the right sysid.  I used a bootable
    linux rescue disk (BG Rescue, I think) to create the partition.

  - the tools in the rescue partition seem be dedicated to recreating
    the disk *exactly* as it shipped.  That means that if you
    rearrange the partition table, e.g. shrinking the windows
    partition, they'll blow it all away.

  - as soon as you get your laptop, I'd call IBM support and request a
    set of recovery CD's.  There's an option in the recovery partition
    to burn your own, but I wanted real CD's.

  - when you turn your laptop on, the first thing that it does is
    convert the windows partition from some-flavor-of-FAT to NTFS.  If
    want to use a suspend-to-disk-file, that means that you have to
    burn another parition (slice) for a FAT filesystem.  I googled up
    a dirty trick where I did a total reinstall (post-whoops) then
    instead of booting and letting it do the conversion, I booted from
    a linux rescue CD, renamed the conversion utility, then let it
    boot normally.  It took a lot longer to configure itself, but I
    ended up with a FAT windows partition.  Since I've given up on the
    S4bios suspend, I may not leave it this way, but it seems to
    work....

  - I used to be (from experience w/ my Sony Vaio) a stickler for
    keeping the vendor's original code in the MBR, and installing any
    fancier boot stuff at the beginning of the active partition (which
    seemed to be the only way to get suspend to disk to behave right
    on the sony).

    I use GRUB as my multiboot loader, but I couldn't get it to behave
    if I installed it at the beginning of my FreeBSD slice.  Since the
    machine was still in flux, I installed it into the MBR [where it
    worked happily], non-acpi suspend-to-disk still worked and acpi
    suspend-to-disk was still non-existent.

  - I ended up buying a copy of Acronis' Disk Director, since my
    slightly-out-of-date-but-claimed-xp-support copy of ParitionMagic
    7 messed up when trying to resize the NTFS XP partition.

  - My only niggles with the machine at this point are:

      o I wish that suspend-to-disk worked under ACPI.

      o When it resumes from S3 suspend, it takes the mouse 15-20
        seconds to regain consciousness.

      o I wish the little status led/light for the mini-pci wireless
        card worked (rumor has it that it will someday).

      o I'd happily trade the parallel port for a firewire port.

      o I wish there was a FreeBSD driver for the Conextant
        softmodem. 

      o Even though it has a pair of pc-card slots, I can't quite cram
        my double-height Xircom modem/enet card into them.

      o I wish the vmware3 port worked w/ ACPI enabled (I'm still
        trying to figure out if there's hope or not...).

Here's the fdisk output for my current configuration:

      ******* Working on device /dev/ad0 *******
      parameters extracted from in-core disklabel are:
      cylinders=155061 heads=16 sectors/track=63 (1008 blks/cyl)
      
      Figures below won't work with BIOS for partitions not in cyl 1
      parameters to be used for BIOS calculations are:
      cylinders=155061 heads=16 sectors/track=63 (1008 blks/cyl)
      
      Media sector size is 512
      Warning: BIOS sector numbering starts with sector 1
      Information from DOS bootblock is:
      The data for partition 1 is:
      sysid 12 (0x0c),(DOS or Windows 95 with 32 bit FAT (LBA))
          start 63, size 25174737 (12292 Meg), flag 0
              beg: cyl 0/ head 1/ sector 1;
              end: cyl 1023/ head 14/ sector 63
      The data for partition 2 is:
      sysid 18 (0x12),(Compaq diagnostics)
          start 147147840, size 9147600 (4466 Meg), flag 0
              beg: cyl 1023/ head 255/ sector 63;
              end: cyl 1023/ head 239/ sector 63
      The data for partition 3 is:
      sysid 165 (0xa5),(FreeBSD/NetBSD/386BSD)
          start 25174800, size 41928705 (20473 Meg), flag 80 (active)
              beg: cyl 1023/ head 255/ sector 63;
              end: cyl 1023/ head 254/ sector 63
      The data for partition 4 is:
      <UNUSED>

g.