Date: Fri, 6 Oct 2000 13:18:49 -0700 From: Leo Shum <shum@cs.washington.edu> To: freebsd-mobile@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: IBM Thinkpad T20 Message-ID: <200010062018.NAA08479@tahiti.cs.washington.edu>
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I recently saw some postings about not able to get FreeBSD running on T20 and/or A20 and my experience last night may give shed some hints. Here's my story: I bought a T20 last month. The Win98SE came preinstalled with the laptop. I ran FIPS to shrink the partition and create space for my other OSes. The next OS I put on was FreeBSD 4.1 and it installed and boots fine. Then I tried to put Win2k and ran into some problem because I overlooked the 1024-cylinder BIOS limitation. I tried to use the last 3 Gig of my 12Gig HD for Win2k and even with LBA, 9 Gig is beyond BIOS' addressability. Anyway I switched the partition around and made the second partition be the Win2k and the third one is FreeBSD. When installing Win2k, because I wanted the Win2k and Win98 parition to be completely seperate from each other, I had to hide the Win98 partition. My experience with WinNT tells me that WinNT will install the OSLOADER and NTDETECT in the first NT recognizable patition. Since NT doesn't recognize FAT32 so it is not a problem but Win2k does. I was afraid that Win2k would do the same thing, ie putting the OSLOADER to the Win98 parition. So what I did was before installing Win2k, I changed the Win98 partition ID from 12 to 164. The 164 was just an arbitrary number I picked. The Win2k installation went fine just as I had wanted to and the OSLOADER was installed in the Win2k (NTFS) partition. Once Win2k was installed, I restored the FAT32 partition ID to 12. The laptop was running great for the last month. Last night I needed to reinstall Win2k. This time, again, I changed the Win98 (FAT32) partition ID. However, for no reason at all, I picked the number 120. Again it was arbitrary. Then problem followed. I could not get the machine to boot anymore. Not even getting to the BIOS, just like what other people experienced. I called IBM support. After an hour over the phone he was convinced that the BIOS was having problem. He said he would drop off a shipping box for me to ship the laptop for service. After getting off the phone, I tried again booting the machine, only this time without the HD attached. Boom! it worked! I could get into the BIOS. Immediately I knew what the problem was as I read some postings about BIOS' inability to recognize some partition ID. Luckily I have a Toshiba laptop sitting around. I plugged the HD into the Toshiba laptop and booted the Toshiba with the FreeBSD floppies. Once I was in sysinstall, I changed the win98se partition back to 164, something I knew would work for the T20. After that, T20 boots again. So I finished reinstalling Win2k and restored the FAT32 partition ID to 12. End of story. Lessons learned: IBM's BIOS seems to be very picky about the partition ID of the first partition. All the time the active partition has been the FreeBSD one so I don't believe the partition ID of the active partition matters. Seems like the BIOS only cares about the first partition ID and it has to be something it understands. This incidence makes me believe that if you use a dual boot laptop with Windows as the first partition, the laptop should work fine no matter what other OSes you put after the first one. However, if you just want FreeBSD or other unsupported OSes on the laptop, maybe you can try creating a non-existent first parition in your MBR. My suggestion is to create the first partition as a type 12 (FAT32), starting address 0 and ending address 63 (this is the empty space anyway). Then the second one can be whatever you want it to be. If you want to use the whole harddrive, you may even setup the first partition as type 12, start 0 and end 0 to workaround the BIOS "mis-feature." Leo To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-mobile" in the body of the message
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