ThinkPad Question

[mikebw at bilow.bilow.uu.ids.net (Mike Bilow)]

Mark wrote in a message to Mike Bilow:

 M> MCA is supported in 2.2.x.  My problem is that I can boot
 M> 2.2.x and see the harddrive, but I don't have a root
 M> partition on it yet and can't fdisk or mount it with out one
 M> (catch 22).  I've tried creating one on floppy and booting
 M> it, but I get VFS errors.  I clearly need more research on
 M> creating a 2.2.x boot floppy and root partition disk on a
 M> 2.0.36 machine. 

 M> It's an old 720.

You can get a Reference Disk from IBM's web site (ftp://ftp.pc.ibm.com).

I cannot see any reason that you would need to have the hard drive partitioned
in order to run fdisk.  You need to run the utilities from the Reference Disk
in order to configure the system for IPL, which involves using a proprietary
interface to write onto a reserved area of the hard drive.  This, in turn, may
require that you issue special arguments ("hd=..." or "floppy=thinkpad") to
Linux when it boots to set the drive geometry explicitly.

Although the MCA IPL procedure is proprietary, it ends up doing the same thing
as any standard non-MCA BIOS machine: loading and executing the master boot
record from the partition sector.  I have absolutely no experience with the
ThinkPad 720, but I cannot see any obvious reason for it to fail.

For purposes of this discussion, "IPL" and "IML" are the same thing.

Another option, although pretty drastic, would be to configure the machine for
MS-DOS using the Reference Disk, and then install Linux onto the MS-DOS FAT
partition using LoadLin and the umsdos filesystem.
 
-- Mike


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