🚀 go-pugleaf

Hi people, I just succeed trying to boot my Thinkpad with a stock (i.e.,
from kernel.org, not SuSE) kernel.  Here's why there was a problem.

Thinkpads come with a region on the disk you're not supposed to get to,
containing a compressed as-shipped image of the hard drive.  This is done
(I think) with a malformed partition table.  You can restore the hard drive
with the BIOS.  When I made additional partitions with the SuSE 9.1 install
DVD, it made (or allowed me to make, take your pick) a noncompliant 4th
partition, as shown below:

Disk /dev/hda: 26.8 GB, 26881188864 bytes
15 heads, 63 sectors/track, 55558 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 945 * 512 = 48340 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End     Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1   *           1       27776   13124128+   7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda2           27777       38960    5289440   83  Linux
/dev/hda3           38961       40958     944055   82  Linux swap
/dev/hda4           40959       62016    9949905   83  Linux

Note it ends beyond what the partition table says is the last cylinder.
SuSE's "official" kernel doesn't have a problem with this, but regular
kernels do.  What I did was boot SuSE, tar up /usr, delete the 4th
partition, then boot up System Rescue CD (highly recommended), recreate the
4th partition ending on cylinder 55558, and untar the data into it.  Moving
its end from 62016 to 55558 shrank it from about 10 GB to 6.6 GB; I'll
shuffle things around eventually.

-- 
-eben    ebQenW1@EtaRmpTabYayU.rIr.OcoPm    home.tampabay.rr.com/hactar
              
           This message was created using recycled electrons.