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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.

When you’re using ThinkPad, then there’s a good chance you are using Lenovo’s ThinkVantage Client Security for authentication with fingerprints and/or passwords. And there’s also a good chance of you running Windows and then it’s always a good idea to have a software firewall running in the background, just in case. And I like ZoneAlarm Free Firewall.

When you install it and restart, then your login screen will hang for couple of minutes, then it displays an error and gives you the possibility to login using Windows authentication (because Client Security got banned by ZA).

That can be rather annoying, but I found a solution so ZA and TV CS can get along with each other. This post by johnhpgreen helped.

In ZA find “Program Control – Programs” and enable access to trusted zone on following services:

• cssauth – maybe older or newer versions have different names
• to enable other ThinkVantage apps might also be a good idea – I had some enabled before I got hit with this issue
• Windows NT Logon Application

Here are some thoughts for the users of Lenovo ThinkPads with XP.

There is quite a lot of bloatware (or is it crapware, I keep mixing those up) preinstalled on your Thinkpad and the easiest way to get rid of it is to do a custom factory install/recovery from your ThinkVantage boot menu. You can install Windows from the maintenance partition with some additional utilities. The good aspect of it is, that you can choose which crapware to install. I was tempted to not install anything, but then the software is already there, why not try to learn if some of it is actually useful.

So the hardware is Lenovo ThinkPad T60 2007FVG, a nice laptop with 15” screen, fingerprint reader, 3 USB ports, three additional volume control buttons, one PCMCIA slot and one ExpressCard slot (PCI-express in PCMCIA sized hole). So let’s take a look at software available.

Useful apps

• PC-Doctor for Windows – an utility to diagnose hardware problems. It has loads of tests. I guess if you’d run it regularly, you could prevent your harddrive from dying of such.
• Presentation Director – Fn+F7, an utility to manage your video configuration
• Productivity Center Supplement for ThinkPad – part of the menu you can conjure in Windows with the blue ThinkVantage button, I consider it quite useful sometimes, so I don’t want to lose the extra options there
• ThinkVantage Access Connections – Fn+F5 – your little networking manager, much better then XP default,
• ThinkVantage Productivity Center – well, it’s the menu under blue ThinkVantage button, so if you use it, then it’s probably a good thing to have.
• WINXP – ILA Update – TVSU2 – seems somekind of update to XP, probably better to have it, but didn’t really find anything useful on that one on the net.

Other crap

• Access Help
• Acrobat Reader – probably an old version so why bother installing it
• Away Manager 2.0 – got no idea why is this useful, seems some resource management tool. Only time seen it in use is when you go from Productivity Center to “Maintenance – Run task”, then the Windows defrag utility is used to run in the Away Manager.
• Diskeeper Lite – freeware utility to defragment your hard drive. Maybe it defrags your HDD a bit faster, otherwise I wouldn’t really see the usefulness in that. And the funny thing is that if you select “Maintenance – Run Task Now” from the Productivity Center (TV blue button), then it uses Windows’ own defrag utility. Go figure.
• Google Picasa – some old version
• Help Center for ThinkPad – another help something
• Message Center for ThinkPad – the thing that keeps annoying you every once in awhile with some stupid messages, nothing useful
• Microsoft Windows Live Toolbar – if I need my browser window to be smaller, then I just resize it, not install some stupid toolbars
• SUN JRE 1.5.0.06 – some old Java
• Symantec Client Security – probably some lame-ass trialware
• Symantec Client Security Virus Definitions – some more crapware to be replaced by AVG or such free antivirus
• System Migration Assistant – some ThinkVantage enterprise bloatware, probably more complicated and annoying “user files copying system”
• ThinkPad EasyEject Utility – Fn+F9 – one helluva stupid utility. It somewhat duplicates the windows “safely remove hardware” utility, but it doesn’t show you the drive letter or name what you’re about to disconnect. So if you have 2 USB sticks, you can choose to remove an “USB mass storage device” or an “USB mass storage device”. “Chance favors the prepared mind”?
• ThinkVantage System Update – been using the laptop for over a year and haven’t seen any Lenovo updates. Maybe it’s something to do with enterprise Lenovo environment, so it would definately go under the “crap” category
• TVT Welcome Message Applet – you have got to be kidding me
• Wallpaper 2005 (world map) – I guess it’s one of those ThinkPad trademark things.
• XP Themes 2005 – LC – no thanks

Haven’t got a clue

.. so I’m not going to install them.

• RnR – Enhanced Diagnostic
• RnR – Enhanced Diagnostics Diskette Image
• ThinkPad Configuration
• ThinkPad Configuration Data I
• ThinkPad Configuration for DOS (Command Prompt)

After all that, found this presentation about ThinkVantage Technologies, that has many familiar buzzwords in there, but didn’t really help that much.

PS

Some final suggestions – “ThinkVantage – Update my system” is a good idea. They are trying to do something like the usual Linux online package repositories, but with Lenovo software. There are couple of additional third party software too like Flash plugin, Diskeeper and such, but who installs software like that in Windows. In Linux you might set up your whole system with apt-get oneliner, but in Windows you are supposed to work and feel the pain. You can use my list of freeware on Windows to get started with setting up your Win.

Enjoy!