Windows XP Preload

My R31 shipped with two FAT32 partitions on the 30G drive - a single large partition containing the XP preload and a small (900+M) hidden "recovery" partition at the end of the disk.

The recovery partition takes the place of a recovery CD (which is not included with the system). Pressing F11 early in the POST boots the recovery parition and overwrites the first partition on the hard drive with the factory preload. Other partitions are left unmolested. (If the first partition isn't big enough, the process fails silently.)

The BIOS relies on something in the MBR to indicate the recovery partition is present and bootable, so if one overwrites the MBR with, say, GRUB, the ability to boot the recovery partition and restore the system disappears. (The recovery partition cannot be marked active and booted directly - an attempt to do so generates the "Invalid system disk" message.) If one calls IBM service and informs them that one has trashed the MBR, IBM will send a set of recovery CDs. (This makes it possible to completely wipe the XP preload if desired, but restore it before selling the machine on eBay some years in the future...) The recovery CD behaves in the same fashion as the recovery partition (i.e., overwrites the first partition with the preload) if there is a partition table available. If there is no partition table, the recovery CD creates the recovery partition and boots it.

There is a program on the preload (search for RRDISK.BAT) that can be used to create a bootable diskette that can "unhide" the recovery partition. (This may require an MBR that isn't too badly mangled.) This is of marginal use since none of the R31 models ships with a diskette drive.

The XP preload partition is converted from FAT32 to NTFS during automatic configuration when the machine is first booted up. There is no obvious convenient way to skip this step, although according to the online XP help this is supposed to be an optional step. I presume the original configuration has some batch file somewhere that does the deed. If so, hiding the convert.exe utility (in winnt\system32) might keep the partition formatted in a way that Linux can write to. There are a couple of times during the recovery process when the machine spends a good deal of time installing preloaded apps. At that point one can open a window and do things...