[ale] Debian install on IBM R40 :(

[David S. Jackson]

On Mon, Nov 10, 2003 at 10:57:34AM -0500 Mazukna, Thomas <Thomas.Mazukna at delta.com> wrote:
> Hi crowd,
> 
> Being Debian to the bone I have installed unstable on my new IBM R40
> ThinkPad.
> I used new "sarge" netinst cd... everything went fine until I managed to
> mess up my boot somehow.
> Here is what happened.
> Install went fine, but Debian is the only option in lilo, I have XP
> sitting in /dev/hda1, so I went and edited lilo.conf.
> When installing lilo complained about devfs not being mounted and that I
> should refer to disks something like this:
> /host/ide/target0/device0/lun0/disk or similar ....don't remember
> exactly.
> When rebooted lilo come up.. I can boot XP fine, tried booting Debian I
> get to the point of mounting root and it stops their saying that
> /de/hda3 has no valid table and it in not ext2 partition.
> 
> Tried booting from rescue CD I have, but it hung on trying to mount
> root.

Not sure on the R40, but the T40 uses a tricky little "pre-desktop
area" at the *end* of the freespace on the drive.  It looks like it
isn't really there, but don't be deceived: it is.  At least on my
T40.  So, on my TP, you have to look at the total cylinders on the
drive, then subtract the number of cyls that appear as freespace
(should be about 3 to 4 Gbytes or so leftover), and mark that space
as unused.  Don't let anything reformat that space.  Anyway, I think
tuxmobile.com also contains links on tips/tricks for installing on
certain laptops, ibm TPs included:  http://www.tuxmobile.com/ibm.html

>From what I gather, you don't *have* to preserve the predesktop area,
but you'll have to do some more tricks to get around it.  The link
above should lead you to what others have done.  I saw about 11 other
links to R40 sites.

-- 
David S. Jackson                                dsj at dsj.net
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