.mrt memo

Another post for the users of ThinkPads. This time on dual booting with Windows XP, because it’s not that straightforward the way I did it.

Just for intormation – Estobuntu is an Estonian conversion of Kubuntu 7.10 with support to Estonian ID-card in Firefox 2, “Kõu” wireless internet connection covering almost all of Estonia and it’s meant to be used in Estonian. But the information below is applicable to any Linux you try to install onto your ThinkPad.

Outline

The objective was to dualboot XP and Estobuntu without harming the ThinkVantage maintenance partition from where you can restore and recover your system. If you don’t care about that, then there is no need to waste 5G-s of HD-space. Install XP and then Linux as with any other PC. But I wanted to preserve the 5G maintenance partition, because it appears Lenovo has some utilities like fingerprint enrolling and such available only in Windows. So if for nothing else, you should leave XP only for that reason.

And of course – I strongly suggest you make a backup of your installation after you get your XP up and running with your apps. ThinkVantage Rescue and Recovery has the facilities to do it, so why not use it? I had a bad experience with DVD-s (3 altogether – 1 for RnR partition recovery and 2 for my Windows installation recovery) so I would suggest a USB drive. The latter worked for me rather good and I was able to restore my system from it.

Some searching revealed some posts warning not to install GRUB boot loader on the usual place in MBR, but instead using WinXP’s boot loader to load Linux. So below I’ll give some links and quick memo of the installation. I also expect you know your own setup a bit, so you can replace /dev/sda (SCSI device) with /dev/hda (IDE device) or hd0,1 with hd1,3 where you see necessary – I’ll just write a short memo of the installation here. More information behind the links.

Probably it would be wise for you to read a nice post by Life is a Venture, who gives the warning about maintenance partition and points to some good howto’s. I’ll bring out some main point below.

Howto

You have Windows XP installed and backed up.

Boot into Linux livecd

First thing to do is to backup your MBR as described here. /dev/sda is your WinXP harddrive.

sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=MBRbackup.img bs=446 count=1

Next you install Linux as usual, begin with resizing the XP partition and move on to slicing yourself some Linux partitions. Only pay attention that you don’t install GRUB onto your MBR. Also don’t install it in (hd0,0) or (hd0,1) which respectively are your Windows XP partition and Lenovo maintenance partition. For example I installed GRUB on “/dev/sda4” aka “(hd0,3)” – where I installed my Linux. (hd0,2) is my Swap partition. You need to look for some advanced conf options in your Linux installer to install the GRUB into the right place.

After partitioning you need to take the first 512 Bytes aka the bootloader you just installed and make it available for WinXP bootloader. I used the LiveCD environment to copy the resulting bin-file to my USB stick and then booted to XP. More thorough description found here.

sudo dd if=/dev/sda4 of=/media/disk/estobuntu.bin bs=512 count=1

Reboot into Windows.

In XP copy estobuntu.bin to C:\. Then go to Control Panel – System – Advanced – Startup and Recovery – Edit. Notepad opens and you can add the following line into the end:

C:\estobuntu.bin=”Estobuntu”

As you can guess, the first is your first 512 bytes from the Linux partition. Between the quotes is the name appearing in the WinXP bootloader.

Now you can reboot and get into your fresh installation of Linux through Windows bootloader.

Links to more thorough articles:

• Installing Feisty Fawn 7.04 on a ThinkPad T60
• Backup your MBR
• Windows XP + Hardy Heron LTS picture by picture
• Creating a dual booting Windows XP and Ubuntu laptop
• Estobuntu

Further study

• A recovery install of XP from maintenance partition would destroy the Linux install – perhaps there is a way to avoid that?
• Perpahs there is a way for GRUB to work with maintenance partition and the ThinkVantage blue button? I can see the maintenance partition in my GRUB and boot into the maintenance partition from there, so I’m not exactly sure if the fuss of NOT installing GRUB onto MBR has anything to it.