Howto install RedHat Enterprise Linux 3 ES - RHEL 3 - on the IBM Thinkpad A31p laptop without breaking the IBM recovery partition or your Windows XP installation

by goodgirl
goodgirl @ nerdshack.com

INTRODUCTION

This guide works by booting from a Knoppix Linux distribution to run QTparted (ntfsresize) and then by using bootpart for windows http://www.winimage.com/bootpart.htm.

This way you can resize your NTFS partition with a simple, graphical tool, and you will not destroy the orignal IBM boot options because you will not install Grub into the MBR but into the Linux partition and then you will tell BootPart to load Grub by modifying the Windows boot.ini.

CAUTION:

Backup all your data, if something doesn't work and you break your XP installation and lose data I am not responsible for it!

GUIDE:

again, BACKUP!

Step 1) Boot your Windows XP as usual, defragment your hard drive completely to make space on your harddrive. (Start - All Programs - Accessories - System Tools - Disk Defragmenter

Step 2) Download a Knoppix CD image and burn it for example with NERO onto a CD ROM. (www.knoppix.org)

Step 3) Ensure your Thinkpad BIOS is set up to boot from CD.

Step 4) Insert the Knoppix CD

Step 5) Reboot your machine, knoppix should boot fine from CD and bring up the graphical X interface.

Step 6) Click on the "K" on the bottom left of the screen, then on "System" and start the tool QTParted.

Step 7) Select dev/hda then select the NTFS partition, then "Operations" "&Resize" enter the new size, keep in mind the minimum size for the partition shown.

Step 8) Save the changes, close QTParted and remove the Knoppix CD

Step 9) Insert the first RedHat CD into your drive, reboot ("K" "Logout" ..)

Step 10) Install Redhat and when asked where to install the Linux bootloader GRUB, do NOT select the Mster Boot Record (MBR) but the Linux partition.

Step 11) After the installation Windows XP will boot, you will not get any options to boot the new Linux yet.

Step 12) Download the windows bootloader called BootPart from here http://www.winimage.com/bootpart.htm to the root of your drive C: and unzip it there.

Step 13) Go to the root of the drive C: and look for the file boot.ini, right-click on it and change properties removing the read-only check mark. Open boot.ini in Notepad and save it as boot-safe.ini

Step 14) type "bootpart" at the command prompt to see a list of the partitions in your hard-drive

Step 15) At the C: prompt type bootpart X bootsect.lnx where X is the number of your Linux boot partition that you saw by using the previous command

Step 16) check the changes made to boot.ini using command "bootpart list"

Step 17) change the properties of boot.ini back to read-only

Step 18) When you reboot your machine now you will see in the boot dialog an entry to boot in Linux. Select this. If you did it correctly than you will now boot into GRUB where again you have a choice between booting Windows or Linux. If you get an error, try to do steps 13) to 18) again and try another partition number with the bootpart command after removing the entry you made last time.

Note after this procedure Windows XP Pro did a check on the disk, but this did not cause problems.

Wireless Setup for Prism 2.5 card (built-in)

This did not work right after the installation of Redhat Enterprise 3 ES.

What I did to get it to work:

Step 1) Open a new terminal window in X

Step 2) run the command "neat"

Step 3) Click "New" to add a new Device

Step 4) Click "Wireless Connection" , "Forward", select the Prism card and set up your WEP key and DHCP settings if needed

Step 5) Click "Activate" say yes if you are asked to save changes.

Note, if you want the card to be active on every boot you also need to check the box for this on the "general" tab.