Date: Tue, 28 Nov 2000 18:26:38 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: /dev/null@FreeBSD.ORG Cc: tlambert@primenet.com (Terry Lambert), freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG, freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Here is what IBM thinks about using FreeBSD on their newer Thinkpads Message-ID: <200011281826.LAA10263@usr08.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <200011281817.eASIHSF25817@mass.osd.bsdi.com> from "Mike Smith" at Nov 28, 2000 10:17:28 AM
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> > FWIW, the "recovery procedure" they allude to is to use their > > recovery CDROM, which will basically repartition and reinstall the > > default software that came with the machine. I'll guess that they > > don't recommend specific recovery instructions (and refer only to > > "various utilities") as a hold harmless measure, since the > > recovery CD will effectively blow away any user data on the drive, > > and they don't want to be held responsible for that. > > Actually, the "recovery procedure" involves removing the harddisk, since > the BIOS code in question that fails does so before the boot process > starts, and with a FreeBSD partition on the disk, you never get to boot > at all. > > This has been discussed on -mobile already, and any interested party is > encouraged to consult the archives. I think this presumes that the HD is examined at boot time, instead of stopping once the system sees a bootable CDROM, which is the normal case when doing a recovery. You should talk to Evan Oldford (evan@whistle.com, eoldford@us.ibm.com) about his experiences recovering with the recovery CDROM, after having trashed several models of thinkpads with FreeBSD installs gone wrong. Obviously, you could also recover by removing the hard drive and zapping it, but the technical note referred to by the original author of this subject specifically states that there are utilities that can recover the HDD to a bootable state: "The HDD can be recovered to make the system bootable again using various utilities. However, IBM does not recommend any specific utility or support the use of any of these utilities." I think the "magic" combo to force it to ignore the HDD is something like "Alt-F6" during boot, but don't quote me: it's printed in the ThinkPad manual that comes with each ThinkPad. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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