Member Avatar for jbennet

Hello, I have an oldish P3 IBM Thinkpad R30 with 128 of RAM (But 8mb is shared with the graphics card).

It came with M$ Windows 98 and I would like to install linux onto t. I have some linux experience, mainly on older network servers.

However, I am dubious about bootloader instillaion as when my machine starts up, I get a "Push F11" to begin recovery" option.

I plan to keep Win 98 and the recovey partition (hiden) by using partition magic 7 (a free copy I have) to resize windows partition to 10gb or so.

However, Will installing GRUB (I plan to use fedora 1 - Not 4 as it has graphics issues) wipe the F11 prompt from my MBR.

I have the option to make a "recovery repair diskette" to reinsert the prompt into the MBR at a later date but I cannot use it as I have no floppy drive as my model is no longer supported by IBM.

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by petercoti

Dani AI

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Short answer: yes — if you install GRUB into the disk MBR you will overwrite the IBM “F11” recovery handler. Instead of blindly reinstalling the machine (as suggested), back up the original MBR and the recovery partition first, then pick a safe boot strategy.

Make a safe copy of the MBR before changing anything. Boot a rescue/live CD, mount the Windows/FAT partition and copy both the full MBR and just the bootstrap area. Keeping the first 446 bytes (bootstrap only) lets you restore the IBM boot code without clobbering any later partition-table changes made while resizing. Example (adjust device names to your system, e.g. /dev/hda or /dev/sda):

# mount the Windows partition at /mnt/win first
dd if=/dev/hda of=/mnt/win/mbr_full.bin bs=512 count=1
dd if=/dev/hda of=/mnt/win/mbr_bootcode.bin bs=446 count=1

Two practical choices after that:

  • Leave the IBM MBR in place and install GRUB to the Linux partition boot sector (e.g. /dev/hda6). That preserves F11 but requires some way to chainload the Linux partition (BootMagic or another boot manager).
  • Install GRUB to the MBR and add a GRUB menu item that chainloads the recovery partition. Test the recovery menu entry right after install. Example GRUB legacy entry to chainload a partition (change partition number as needed):
title IBM Recovery
root (hd0,2)
chainloader +1

If anything goes wrong, restore the IBM boot code (preserving the current partition table) with:

dd if=/mnt/win/mbr_bootcode.bin of=/dev/hda bs=446 count=1

Do not move or delete the hidden recovery partition with Partition Magic — shrinking is OK but avoid moving the recovery area. Defragment Windows first and, if possible, create vendor recovery media or copy the MBR backups to external media (CD/USB). Use dd carefully: a wrong device will destroy data.

Member Avatar for petercoti

Hello, I have an oldish P3 IBM Thinkpad R30 with 128 of RAM (But 8mb is shared with the graphics card).

It came with M$ Windows 98 and I would like to install linux onto t. I have some linux experience, mainly on older network servers.

However, I am dubious about bootloader instillaion as when my machine starts up, I get a "Push F11" to begin recovery" option.

I plan to keep Win 98 and the recovey partition (hiden) by using partition magic 7 (a free copy I have) to resize windows partition to 10gb or so.

However, Will installing GRUB (I plan to use fedora 1 - Not 4 as it has graphics issues) wipe the F11 prompt from my MBR.

I have the option to make a "recovery repair diskette" to reinsert the prompt into the MBR at a later date but I cannot use it as I have no floppy drive as my model is no longer supported by IBM.

re-install the commputer.

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