Re: Error booting diag partition on T42 laptop

[Paul Bolle]

On Wed, 2005-10-05 at 09:24 -0400, G. Vincent Castellano wrote:
> The bit of research I did seems to show that the key technologies in
> the setup of the diag partition are (I swear I'm not making this up)
> BEER (Boot Engineering Extension Record) and PARTIES (Protected Area
> Runtime Interface Extension Services) but I don't have the context to
> pursue this any further. However I'd be glad to dig out any specific
> pieces of information from my T42 that would help someone to move this
> forward.

It seems your ThinkPad T42 doesn't have an HPA (an HPA is not a
partition and, AFAIK, won't show up in fdisk) but an "ordinary" Rescue
and Recovery partition. They are easily confused as both are accessed
with the "Access IBM" button and both seem to launch into some
"Predesktop Area".

See http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/PreDesktop_Area for information on the
HPA and http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Rescue_and_Recovery for (a little)
information on the Rescue and Recovery partition. (Disclaimer: I edited
the page on the HPA quite heavily. That page might be incorrect. It's a
wiki, so you're invited to edit the page if this bothers you.)

Kind regards,


Paul Bolle