Thinkpad Saga Continues

[Beth Hatch]

Hi everyone,  Because so many of you kindly posted on this list and 
privately to me concerning getting Linux on my Thinkpad, I figured I 
would update you all on what has happened in case it saves some of you 
the trouble and annoyance I have been experiencing lately.<smile>  I'm 
sure those of you more knowledgeable than myself on this may have been 
able to resolve it better and quicker, but I'm still learning, as you 
will soon see.<smile>



    My machine came with a 120 gigabyte hard drive with a 30 gigabyte 
rescue partition containing the computer's recovery files, the other 
partition was taken up by Windows XP and various Thinkpad and Windows 
applications. 

    First, I tried to hook up the docking station and install Fedora 
using the docking station's serial port to have Speakup talk for me.  
Speakup could not be found when I specified my Dectalk express as the 
synthesizer, whether I specified a tty port by naming it specifically as 
suggested by Janina or by having Speakup find it without specifying the 
tty port.  Consequently, in order to do my class assignments, I decided 
to have my instructor assist me in installing Fedora and together we  
got Gnome and Orca up and running.

    When we tried to install Windows XP to set up the dual boot system, 
my XP disk kept hanging at the hardware inspection portion of the 
installation.  Believe me, if I didn't need this laptop for school which 
requires Windows and Linux, I would just keep a Linux system!!<smile>  
Lenovo tech support said on its web site to turn off the dual core 
processor support in the bios temporarily to allow Windows XP to install 
properly.  I had a friend assist me and we turned off the dual core as 
directed.  We still couldn't install XP, same problem, XP hanging at the 
hardware inspection process.

    Just for grins, a fellow geek  friend who agreed to help me disabled 
just about everything in the bios, just to get XP running, no go with 
that either, same problem.  She tried a Windows 2000 disk, just to see 
if she could see my Linux partition, and voila! Windows 2000 at least 
figured out that Linux lived on my system and found the rescue 
partition.  She nuked those partitions for me, and we are starting from 
scratch!!  It seems that Linux and grub will see my Windows partition if 
I install Windows *before* Windows, but Windows XP gets cranky and won't 
see my Linux partition if I install Linux first and then try to install 
Windows afterwards.  I realize that this sounds strange, so let me 
clarify.  Since there were only two partitions, I had to break the 
larger one to install Linux and the one for the rescue partition wasn't 
big enough for Fedora with all of the other applications and data in the 
rescue partition.  I didn't have access to something like partition 
magic to rebuild the partitions, so we had to take this crazy route 
instead.  This appears to be what happens at school with all of the dual 
boot systems where XP and Fedora 6 are involved, Windows seems to be 
happy being installed first, then Linux and grub set up the dual boot 
properly.  XP is now on my machine, and I am going to try again to 
install Linux.

    Word to the wise, if you have a Thinkpad, the serial port appears to 
be disabled by default in the bios.  We turned it on, and now I'm going 
to try
 again and see how it goes.  I'll keep you posted, unfortunately this 
thing isn't over yet.<smile>

Thanks for listening,

Beth