Re: Error booting diag partition on T42 laptop

[Peter Jones]

On Wed, 2005-10-05 at 09:24 -0400, G. Vincent Castellano wrote:
> I have an IBM T42 laptop which includes a diagnostics/restore partition and I
> want to be able to boot this from Grub, as well as the XP and RedHat 
> partitions.
> 
> I started out by booting from a RedHat install CD, deleted the Windows XP 
> partition, and added  Linux Swap and ext2 filesystems, then I was able to use 
> the diag/recovery partition to restore XP to the space remaining.  I can boot 
> into XP and RedHat no problem, but not to the Diag partition.

This happens because the kernel brokenly disables the Host Protected
Area, and during some OS installation you've wiped the MBR and written a
new one with disk geometry read from the disk.

There's really no way to "undo"; the data is gone so you need to get it
from IBM.  Even then, the same kernel bug plus the userland and
installer's ignorance will probably bite you.

I've got a patch for the kernel that I need to send upstream, which will
make it so distribution installers can at least control if they reset
HPA or not.  Unfortunately at this point we also need to do workarounds
for peoples systems that have already been screwed up :/

-- 
  Peter