I just succeed trying to boot my Thinkpad with a stock (i.e., from
kernel.org, not SuSE) kernel. Here's why there was a problem.
Thinkpads come with a region on the disk you're not supposed to get to,
containing a compressed as-shipped image of the hard drive. This is done
(I think) with a malformed partition table. You can restore the hard
drive with the BIOS. When I made additional partitions with the SuSE 9.1
install DVD, it made (or allowed me to make, take your pick) a
noncompliant 4th partition, as shown below:
Disk /dev/hda: 26.8 GB, 26881188864 bytes
15 heads, 63 sectors/track, 55558 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 945 * 512 = 48340 bytes
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 * 1 27776 13124128+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda2 27777 38960 5289440 83 Linux
/dev/hda3 38961 40958 944055 82 Linux swap
/dev/hda4 40959 62016 9949905 83 Linux
Note it ends beyond what the partition table says is the last cylinder.
SuSE's "official" kernel doesn't have a problem with this, but regular
kernels do. What I did was boot SuSE, tar up /usr, delete the 4th
partition, then boot up System Rescue CD (highly recommended), recreate
the 4th partition ending on cylinder 55558, and untar the data into it.
Moving its end from 62016 to 55558 shrank it from about 10 GB to 6.6 GB;
I'll shuffle things around eventually.
-- -eben ebQenW1@EtaRmpTabYayU.rIr.OcoPm home.tampabay.rr.com/hactarrm -f /bin/laden
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