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    Can't find Service Partion Unlock In Bios?

    Discussion in 'Lenovo' started by BrendaEM, Jan 26, 2008.

  1. BrendaEM

    BrendaEM Notebook Consultant

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    Hi, I have a quite late BIOS in a T61P, in which I can't seem to locate the option to unlock the "service partition," so that it can be removed.

    I already made restore disks.

    I was able to find it in the old BIOS, but I cannot locate it.

    Perhaps I am getting ahead of myself, but is the service partition only locked in windows, or could a Linux boot disk remove it with gparted.
     
  2. MarkoD

    MarkoD Notebook Guru

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    The service partition is only hidden in Windows, you can remove it with gparted or any other partitioning software.
     
  3. optomos

    optomos Notebook Evangelist

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    They (Lenovo) removed that option from the BIOS in these new laptops.
     
  4. Renee

    Renee Notebook Virtuoso

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    "They (Lenovo) removed that option from the BIOS in these new laptops."

    I have a late T61p and it's easy to remove the partition. In this case, I booted an XP distribution disk and deleted the paritition. It is not a BIOS function.
     
  5. BrendaEM

    BrendaEM Notebook Consultant

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    Thank you.

    It's ironic that I was able to unlock it with the original BIOS that came with my machine.
     
  6. Renee

    Renee Notebook Virtuoso

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    The bios probably flipped a bit on the disk in the on-disk table describing the partition attributes.
     
  7. optomos

    optomos Notebook Evangelist

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    It used to be an option on the Thinkpads under: Security->IBM Predesktop Area.
     
  8. BrendaEM

    BrendaEM Notebook Consultant

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    I don't think the option exists in the newer BIOS.

    Because my machine being a T61P, Linux "Bulletproof x" will be broken on graphical boot disks, such as ones that offer Gparted.

    [AFAIK, Linux can be installed on the machine, but the newer restricted drivers need to be in place.]