On Fri, 13 Apr 2007 17:57:38 -0400
Douglas Allan Tutty <dtutty@porchlight.ca> wrote:

> I'm going to be traveling and would like to have a computer with me.
> 
> I used to use an old Thinkpad but the tent I was using it in got hit
> by lightening and the screen and HD got fried.  I can still use an
> external screen but I'm told by two local vendors that new hard
> drives won't be recognized by the BIOS to be bootable; a
> designed-obsolecence feature.
> 

How old a Thinkpad?  That doesn't sound right -- I've upgraded the disk
on many a Thinkpad, without any trouble as long as I wasn't trying to
copy the Windows partition...  

The big issue with most old BIOSs -- and check thinkpad.com for updates
-- is that they can't boot anything whose blocks go past 8G or so.  The
easy fix for that is to have a small / partition on a large disk, with
everything else in another slice.  NetBSD doesn't use the BIOS, so
you're golden.  You *might* have to muck with the drive geometry when
installing the system, though.

If you can borrow a 2.5" drive or pick up a cheap one on Ebay, it's
worth a try, I'd say.


		--Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb