laptop recommendations, Phase II

[david at thekramers.net (David Kramer)]

On Wednesday 02 June 2004 1:49 am, John Abreau wrote:
> What I've been hearing is that the problem is an interaction between
> the 2.6 kernel and something in Windows XP involving drive geometry
> and LBA. Initial complaints were that "it's only Fedora Core 2", and
> that other distributions don't exhibit the problem, but apparently
> those "other distributions" were using the 2.4 kernel, and we're
> starting to see the same problem with Gentoo and Mandrake when they
> install with a 2.6 kernel.
>
> Also, the problem seems to occur when partitioning the drive; I've
> had no problems with Fedora 2 myself, but I've been reinstalling
> on machines that already ran earlier releases of Fedora and Redhat,
> and I don't bother repartitioning; I just keep the same partitioning
> I was already using. So my newest machine was partitioned under
> Redhat 9, and Fedora 2 works fine with it.

In my research, I found that "it's a feature".  The 2.6 kernel function that 
reports drive geometry does so in a slightly different way.  There are new 
functions that also report the old-style values, but the existing functions 
were changed to report in the new way.

The problem is parted was not modified to account to the new geometry scheme, 
so it is misinterpreting the values it sees from the 2.6 kernel.  This is a 
problem Red Hat knew about months before releasing the product, and that's 
why they are being slammed.

I plan to just boot Knoppix and set up my partitions before install to solve 
this problem.  The tricky part on the Thinkpads seems to be that after you 
boot Windows for the first time, it converts the FAT partition to an NTFS 
partition, which is much harder to resize.  You have to either resize before 
first boot, wipe it all out and do a restore before resizing, or find 
something that can resize NTFS partitions.  Not sure which I'll do, but I 
doubt I will start installing Linux before I've verified the laptop is 
working 100% in Windows first.

PS: Just ordered it online 20 minutes ago.
http://www-132.ibm.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/
ProductDisplay?productId=8707186&storeId=1&langId=-1&catalogId=-840

1836BBU + 512MB RAM + Office basic + dock + extra battery

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DDDD   David Kramer         david at thekramers.net       http://thekramers.net
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