Thinkpad T40: Accessing predesktop area / recovery partition

A few questions about how can I put this hidden partition to use.

First, will I be able to access it from another computer (by taking the HDD out of my T40)? Is it just a hidden partition or is it somehow encrypted or not registred as a proper partition ? If it's only accessible on the original system then how can I confirm that it is there and is not empty?

Secondly, how can I restore the default system form it, if the press F11 option was disabled ? I tried using some MBR restore utility form the lenovo site (the one related to repairing the rescue/recovery features, there's another one for something else), so now the F11 option is displayed, but whenever I try to use it I get a ntldr not found message.

I've read some mentions about the recovery partition containing some rescue diskette image (rrdisk.dsk) that allows to use the partition if other methods of access were disabled, any truth in that ?

Right now I'm nearly desperate enough to install Rescue and Recovery, but it appears to cause its own set of problems with restoring from the recovery partition, not to mention being a 220MB download and not a trivial install on a already broken system (yeah, there's a reason for my taking interest in restoring the system :P ).

That text mostly explains how the recovery is supposed to work. The problem is, the F11 was never there, and I don't think I ever had the C:\IBMTOOLS folder - meaning I have to find a different way of getting to the recovery partition. Also it appears the rrdisk.dsk image was intended for previous generation of rescue software (relative to the one in a T40).

I found this interesting page explaining how to fix my problem. Unfortunately, the much needed bmgr32 program is nowhere to be found (as at this point I still belive my only problem is the MBR).

Reading a bit further, I happaned across the 'Using ThinkVantage Technologies: Volume 2' redbook, which gave me some more ideas about what my problem might be about. Among other things, it cleared up why I got the ntldr missing error when I tried to access the Predesktop Environment:
I've also found a program called RRUTIL.EXE, a part of the ThinkVantage Technologies Administrator Tools: Meaning this might let me somehow access the predesktop area, or list its contents to see if it's there at all.

However, the rrutil refuses to work without the Rescue and Recovery being installed - meaning I'll have to get that program anyway, just to get anywhere with my attempts of recovering the default system. So I'm writing this while the 220MB bloatware downloads at the whopping average of 100KB/s... Oh, it's here !

Well, I've managed to boot into the predesktop environment. This thing even has Opera installed, yay !

*** RANT WARNING ***

Still, the logic of how this works eludes me - when I got a badly messed up system, good only for reformating, what I needed to do to get into the rescue environment was downloading and installing a big rescue suite. I'm afraid to even boot into windows right now, at the thought of all the windows popping up on startup asking me to register/backup/defragment or 'discover'. Did I mention my winXP is currently FUBAR and down to a crawl ?

From what I've read, what did the trick was it rewriting the MBR to point to the predesktop area properly. Why the hell didn't IBM simply release a damn program that did that ? All I really needed was a proper MBR image put in place.

I found two floppy images, one that was supposed to do that but didn't, instead braking my system further, requireig booting from another winXP cd into rescue mode, doing fixboot and fixmbr, just to be able to start the broken system again.
The other was supposed to fix system startup after the recovery software was removed, so I didn't even try it.

The support section on the site is indeed very thorough, but often fails to specifically indicate which version of recovery software it's related to. In the end, it took doing the least intuitive thing to do what I wanted to. ie installing a ton of bloatware on an broken system, in order to access a OS independent recovery environment that's supposed to erase and reformat the drive.

The fun continues

Ok, so I went through the trouble of backing up all my stuff to the HDD in my main PC, started up the rescue and recovery and told it to go ahead and restore my system back to the factory default...

WTF?

So what the hell have I been keeping in these 4GB in HPA? Also I'm getting a strange impression I've been fooled by the recovery program and what I'm actually running, whenever I boot into the rescue and recovery thingy, is the junk I downloaded earlier today... Yup just confirmed that... Meaning that if my main system partition becomes messed up, well, that's all this recovery is really worth. That's not to say I don't think highly of it, it's simply that this ain't what I was expecting. A crippled secondary OS to boot to = cool thing, at least in the Windows world...

I guess this means I'm back to looking for a way of accessing the HPA, predesktop area or simply the uber-hidden partition on my HDD.

At present I know that a) I payed for the winXP on my laptop b) Its S/N matches the one on the licence sticker on the bottom of my laptop c) I've got a 40GB HDD with only ~36GB visiable space - a single 36GB partition and no extra space around it. fdisk under linux reports some unassigned sectors and displays no second partition anywhere, but /dev/hda2 is listed, yet not mountable.

Edit: I tried the method that involves reading the end of the drive with the dd command under linux. I booted from a livecd and dumped everything following my main partition to a networked drve on my PC. The good news is that it's not just zeros, so there really is something there, the bad news is that the method of finding drive images described in the guide I'm following doesn't quite work in my case (or I'm doing it wrong). Right now I'm trying to find out how(and where) to split the resulting file.

Ultimately, this article on ThinkWiki helped me get a better understanding of what's going on. Currently I'm convinced that the HPA on my T40 is, simply put, messed up.

My first attempt to grab it was using this technique, that is simply copying it with the dd utility and then splitting the file into disk images. That's because the HPA is supposed to contain partition images, but isn't a partition itself. I couldn't find the split points so I gave up at that point, being frustrated enough for the day.

On monday, I tried using hpaFS - generally utility to mount the HPA as a filesystem under linux. Whatever is on my HDD, has confused that program to a great extent. Trying to view the mounted directory, I got either screenloads of garbage or simply garbage displayed in mc. My stuff was so horrible that even the program's debug option started to spew garbage all over the output file.

At that point I was getting a bit suspicious, but tried again today, with the HPA-toolkit. No luck, altough at least this progran simply told me there's something wrong with the stuff in my HPA. That is, doing 'editbeer /dev/hda show' made the program choke up some mildly offensive error messages.

Also, tonight I bothered to take a closer look at what dd is reading from my disk - appears to be garbage. There's a pattern, around 1,536 bytes long, that's repeated throughout the HPA - and that is to say, that's the only thing I've managed to find in there. I've tried reading pieces from start, middle and the very end, and what I've read appears to match the pattern.

Looks like someone wiped it with cleansweep or boot-and-nuke or whatever did the trick. I haven't yet used any programs to compare the strings, but when I find the time I just might do that, to be sure reclaiming the disk space is my only option. Also, there's still fiesta for me to try out, and I haven't yet tried reading the drive with dd on another computer - maybe it's just the BIOS blocking me from reading from that area on the disk.

I'll probably check in after I've exhausted all my options.