Preparation Work

Removing the Stickers

Once upon a time computers were delivered unadorned. Nowadays you will find any number of stupid stickers glued to the machine in prominent places, informing you about what kind of operating system the machine was originally designed for and what brand of processor it sports. Until a few years ago, these stickers were only mildly adhesive and could be removed without too much hassle.

Not so with our new Thinkpad. After peeling off the stickers, we are left with two sticky patches of super-adhesive glue. To remove these, we put a frew drops of paraffin oil (a.k.a petroleum) on the glue, wait a little bit and then brush away the resulting jelly with a paper tissue. The remaing oil traces can be removed with a mildly alcoholic window cleaner, which in its turn can be removed with a damp paper tissue.

Backup of the Thinkpad Service Partion

We want to install a pure Linux box without any Windows partition. So we would like to have some backup archive, from which we could later on re-recreate the original Windows setup — just in case. IBM in their infinite wisdom decided, however, not to provide any CD-ROMs with this Thinkpad but install an invisible “service partition”, from which the Windows system can be easily restored — and Linux just as easily destroyed — just by pressing <F11> at boot time. There are, however, no provisions whatsoever for the unlikely case of a complete hard-disk failure. To remedy this situation, we would like to make an archive copy of this service partition.

To this end, we boot from the Debian installation CD-ROM, mount this invisible service partition and copy its contents into two suitably sized directories on the main partition, from where we can burn the contents on CD-R.

After having booted from the Debian installation CD-ROM and having selected our favourite language as well as keyboard layout, we launch a text console by pressing <ALT-F2> and then <Return>. First, we use cfdisk to save the original layout of the partitions. We probably need this information, if we would later like to recreate the service partition.

         ---Starting---      ----Ending----     Start Number of
 # Flags Head Sect Cyl   ID  Head Sect Cyl     Sector  Sectors
-- ----- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- --------- ---------
 1  0x80    1    1    0 0x0C  239   63 1023        63 114473457
 2  0x00  239   63 1023 0x1C  239   63 1023 114473520   2736720
 3  0x00    0    0    0 0x00    0    0    0         0         0
 4  0x00    0    0    0 0x00    0    0    0         0         0

Now we create the two mount points /mnt/windows and /mnt/service and then mount /dev/hda1 (the windows partition) to /mnt/windows and /dev/hda2 (the service partition) to /mnt/service. After this, we create two archive directories on /mnt/windows and finally use tar to copy the contents of /mnt/service into these two directories.

#> mkdir /mnt/windows /mnt/service
#> mount /dev/hda1 -t msdos /mnt/windows
#> mount /dev/hda2 -t msdos /mnt/service
#> mkdir /mnt/windows/arch-1 /mnt/windows/arch-2
#> cd /mnt/service
#> tar cf - recovery | (cd /mnt/windows/arch-1; tar xvf -)
#> tar cf - pcdr | (cd /mnt/windows/arch-2; tar xvf -)
#> tar cf - ibmwork | (cd /mnt/windows/arch-2; tar xvf -)
#> tar cf - mfg | (cd /mnt/windows/arch-2; tar xvf -)
#> tar cf - *.exe *.bat *.bin *.prv *.txt *.com *.sys *.hlp *.cpi *.arf *.ini \
> *.def *.tag scri | (cd /mnt/windows/arch-2; tar xvf -)
#> cd /
#> umount /mnt/windows 
#> umount /mnt/service

After rebooting Windows, we actually have to move about half the files from the arch-1/recovery directory to arch-2/recovery to make things fit onto two 700MB CD-Rs.

To recover the original Windows installation, we would have to clear the linux boot loader from the MBR, recreate the partitions from the saved partition table, copy the contents of the two CD-Rs into the recreated service partition, light two incense sticks, clap twice, bow deeply, pray, reboot, press <F11> — and wait.

Tools for the Creation of the Hibernation File

For hibernation to work under Linux we have to create a special hibernation partition. The necessary tools are distributed as an Incredibly Braindead Mess, i.e. a self-extracting archive named stndalhd.exe, which (a) does not run under Windows2000, (b) does only extract to a diskette and (c) is protected by a license, which does not allow the redistribution of its contents in a less idiotic way.