host protected area fun

host protected area fun

[Pekka Pietikainen]

Possible problem documented in irc conversation below, too lazy to rewrite 
all that :-)

Have there been some behavioural changes in this area recently? 
Linux happily overwriting the HPA seems to have happened between 
fc3 and fc4. Could be some userspace partitioning related/bios brokedness
thing too I suppose?

02:04  * pp tries to figure out host protected area stuff
02:04 < pp> _apparently_ these stinkpads have a hidden partition containing
            windows xp etc.
02:04 < pp> which the bios protects
02:04 < pp> linux happily ignores that setting and tries to use that area as
well
02:05 < pp> which works until you eg. resume  from suspend and the area is
            locked again
02:05 < pp> which makes your box pretty unhappy
02:05 < pp> at some point the behaviour was to just ignore the extra space
02:06 < freitag> pp: i think i have machines that print at boot they ignore
the host protected area
02:06 < pp> so whatever is there got nuked :-)
02:07 < pp> apparently could even be bios setup etc. on some models
02:07 < rdd> they can reinstall XP from there too (if it's not nuked)
02:07 < pp> yea
02:08 < pp> basically my laptop went into a state where in "normal" setting
it
            worked until resuming from suspend, after which it got io errors
02:08 < pp> in "secure" mode (no OS access to hpa) the box refused to boot
at all
02:08 < pp> and in "disabled" it's totally happy
02:08 < pp> but the fancy ibm stuff disappeared
02:09 < pp> oh well
02:09 < freitag> tell linux-ide

:-)