Help W510 Dual Boot XP Pro and Red Hat

[copycat]

I have an end user who wants his W510 4389-23U to be a dual boot system with Windows XP pro and Red Hat 5 Linux.

So far, I have downgraded the laptop to windows XP using the Lenovo recovery CD's. The first problem happened when I tried to repartition the hard drive using Partition Magic. Was able to successfully install the software, however, it could not read the partition table.

My next attempt was to boot off of the Red Hat 5 install CD and everything looked okay until it came to the hard drive information. It stated that the HDD was unallocated and could not read the existing partition table. A few more attempts were tried with Unbutu 6 and still the same issue.

I have tried changing to compatibility mode in the bios and still the same results. The only problem with this is it will not boot up into Windows XP, just a BSOD and then reboots.

I suspect there is an compatibility issue with the SATA III hard drive / controller and Linux.

Lenovo support was of little or no help when I called.

Any suggestions?

[dk06]

Possible Solution:

Try AHCI mode (bios setting) for SATA3 support

Download GParted Live CD (boots from cd and runs from ram)

http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php

Use TestDisk to recover partition table (On GParted CD)

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

Then try shrinking the partition with GParted Live CD (It's a good idea to defrag from within windows first)