Hello all,
After a few hours of struggling, I managed to install Fedora 9 on X61 Tablet without having a CD-ROM, and by using mostly the Vista partition and an Internet connection. Here are the exact instructions how to do that, in case of someone interested in it in the future (I think these messages are archived for look up by google:)
You will need the following:
- (notice: since I did not have DVD or CDROM I needed two thumbdrives, one of size at least 4GB for a DVD and the other
of a smaller size - 1GB)
- Defrag your vista installation - this is important!
- Download gparted Live CD iso. I used version 0.3.9-4.
(http://gparted.sourceforge.net/) and "burn" it on a thumbdrive
(or CD). You can use unetbootin for that (http://lubi.sourceforge.net/unetbootin.html).
- Run the gparted Live CD from the machine (put the thumbdrive
in the laptop and click F12 when it boots. Then choose to boot
from the thumbdrive.) Notice: choose the option which says "safe graphics"!
- Allocate as much space as you want for the Linux partition. This resizing may take a little
bit of time.
- Download Fedora 9 DVD installation .iso, x86_64 version is good for X61T as far as I can tell from my case.
- Put it on a disk on key using unetbootin again (notice: you will need gparted again,
so it will save you time not to use the same media for this DVD as well.)
- Same process, boot this thumbdrive with the DVD. Choose "text installation" - for some
reason, Fedora's fonts were not okay at this phase in graphics mode with X61T that I had.
- Install Fedora. When asking about where to put the boot loader GRUB for Fedora, say "boot record"
and *NOT* MBR. Vista tends to overwrite the MBR whenever it feels like it.
- Load the gparted thumbdrive again.
- Run an Xterm from gparted live cd.
- Use fdisk /dev/sda (or whatever your harddisk device is) to find where is the Linux partition and
Windows partition (for example, by typing fdisk /dev/sda, p, then q).
- This is where it gets tricky. I had to use two thumbdrives here. Since I had the one where I copied
the .iso file, I mounted it after loading the gparted (I placed it in a different USB port):
mkdir /tmp/mnt
mount /dev/sdcX /mnt/tmp
- With the help of dd, write the boot sector of the Linux partition:
dd if=/dev/sda2 of=/mnt/tmp/linux.bin bs=512 count=1
- Reboot and load windows. You may see all kind of attempts to "recover" your windows or fix it. Don't
be afraid. You (probably) did not lose any information on the Windows partition if you did everything
correctly. Just let Vista get over its panic attack and get used to its new neighbour OS.
- Now we are left with using Vista's bootloader and the linux.bin file we wrote to set up dual boot
between Vista and Fedora. To do that:
Run cmd as Administrator (Start -> Run -> cmd, then right click on cmd and "Run as Administrator")
copy e:\linux.bin c:\ (where e:\ is where the second thumbdrive is.)
bcdedit /create /d "GRUB" /application BOOTSECTOR
This will lead to a response with a very long UID (if everything goes well.)
We will refer to it from now on as {LinuxID}.
bcdedit /set {LinuxID} device boot
bcdedit /set {LinuxID} PATH \linux.bin
bcdedit /displayorder {LinuxID} /addlast
bcdedit /timeout 10
- Boot the computer. You should be given the option to load eithe Fedora (GRUB) or Vista.
Load Fedora and do the quick setup as requested. In my case, I did not have X11 loaded after that,
but everything was run in text mode. To fix that (meaning, use Fedora GUI), login as root
and use vi /etc/inittab. Change the number "3" to "5" (there should be documentation there explaining
what's going on.) Another thing I would immediately do at this point is "adduser [non-root-user]"
followed by "passwd [non-root-user]" to set its password.
of a smaller size - 1GB)
- Defrag your vista installation - this is important!
- Download gparted Live CD iso. I used version 0.3.9-4.
(http://gparted.sourceforge.net/) and "burn" it on a thumbdrive
(or CD). You can use unetbootin for that (http://lubi.sourceforge.net/unetbootin.html).
- Run the gparted Live CD from the machine (put the thumbdrive
in the laptop and click F12 when it boots. Then choose to boot
from the thumbdrive.) Notice: choose the option which says "safe graphics"!
- Allocate as much space as you want for the Linux partition. This resizing may take a little
bit of time.
- Download Fedora 9 DVD installation .iso, x86_64 version is good for X61T as far as I can tell from my case.
- Put it on a disk on key using unetbootin again (notice: you will need gparted again,
so it will save you time not to use the same media for this DVD as well.)
- Same process, boot this thumbdrive with the DVD. Choose "text installation" - for some
reason, Fedora's fonts were not okay at this phase in graphics mode with X61T that I had.
- Install Fedora. When asking about where to put the boot loader GRUB for Fedora, say "boot record"
and *NOT* MBR. Vista tends to overwrite the MBR whenever it feels like it.
- Load the gparted thumbdrive again.
- Run an Xterm from gparted live cd.
- Use fdisk /dev/sda (or whatever your harddisk device is) to find where is the Linux partition and
Windows partition (for example, by typing fdisk /dev/sda, p, then q).
- This is where it gets tricky. I had to use two thumbdrives here. Since I had the one where I copied
the .iso file, I mounted it after loading the gparted (I placed it in a different USB port):
mkdir /tmp/mnt
mount /dev/sdcX /mnt/tmp
- With the help of dd, write the boot sector of the Linux partition:
dd if=/dev/sda2 of=/mnt/tmp/linux.bin bs=512 count=1
- Reboot and load windows. You may see all kind of attempts to "recover" your windows or fix it. Don't
be afraid. You (probably) did not lose any information on the Windows partition if you did everything
correctly. Just let Vista get over its panic attack and get used to its new neighbour OS.
- Now we are left with using Vista's bootloader and the linux.bin file we wrote to set up dual boot
between Vista and Fedora. To do that:
Run cmd as Administrator (Start -> Run -> cmd, then right click on cmd and "Run as Administrator")
copy e:\linux.bin c:\ (where e:\ is where the second thumbdrive is.)
bcdedit /create /d "GRUB" /application BOOTSECTOR
This will lead to a response with a very long UID (if everything goes well.)
We will refer to it from now on as {LinuxID}.
bcdedit /set {LinuxID} device boot
bcdedit /set {LinuxID} PATH \linux.bin
bcdedit /displayorder {LinuxID} /addlast
bcdedit /timeout 10
- Boot the computer. You should be given the option to load eithe Fedora (GRUB) or Vista.
Load Fedora and do the quick setup as requested. In my case, I did not have X11 loaded after that,
but everything was run in text mode. To fix that (meaning, use Fedora GUI), login as root
and use vi /etc/inittab. Change the number "3" to "5" (there should be documentation there explaining
what's going on.) Another thing I would immediately do at this point is "adduser [non-root-user]"
followed by "passwd [non-root-user]" to set its password.
If everything went well, you should have Vista and Fedora on your X61T laptop, and next time you reboot
you can run either one of them with their GUI.
you can run either one of them with their GUI.
"Keywords for google": x61t, x61 tablet, fedora 9, fedora, linux installation, thinkpad.
Enjoy!
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