No Subject

[dsavage@peaknet.net]

My 2008-vintage ThinkPad W700 "mobile workstation" passed on to the
Heavyside Layer early this past summer. The replacement model P72 was
supposed to have been released mid-August, but it was inexplicably delayed
for almost three months. Mine finally arrived from China last Tuesday.

This is no featherweight Chromebook or Airbook. This a big hamma-jamma
that lives up to its "mobile workstation" moniker. I ordered it with the
6-core Xeon E-2186M (2.9-4.8 GHz) CPU, nVidia Quadro P5200 GPU, 17.3" 4K
(3840x2160) display, 64 GB of DDR4 2400 ECC memory, and dual 2 TB
PCIe-NVMe OPAL2.0 M.2 SSDs in a RAID1 configuration. It weighs a hefty
nine pounds and has a 230W AC power adapter.

It came with Windows 10 Professional pre-installed, but I would like to
pull that off and replace it with Fedora 29 and move Windows 10 to a
virtual machine.

I've run into a few problems:

(1) The Fedora-MATE-Compiz-Live-29 live ISO spin does not boot correctly
from a thumb drive. I always use an ISO spin to confirm hardware
compatibility before attempting a formal installation. It's apparent that
F29 and the P72 don't yet play well together.

(2) A Fedora users group member suggested I use Clonezilla as a
cross-platform tool to make an exact copy of the pre-installed Windows and
P2V that copy for the virtual machine. This poses a few problems:

     (a) Lenovo pre-installed Windows 10 Pro to a a single RAID1 partition
encompassing almost the entire 2T RAID1 mirrored pair. It would have
been a lot easier if they had they installed it to a 100 GB partition
and left the rest of the drive unpartitioned. Backing up 100 GB is a
whole lot easier than 1.8 TB. An external 2 TB HDD will cost me $55
at MicroCenter.

     (b) I don't think the latest version of Clonezilla
(clonezilla-live-20180812-bionic-amd64.iso) can read an Intel
firmware controlled RAID1 pair of PCIe M.2 drives. (It may share this
problem with F29.) When I boot the CD and drop to a CLI, there's no
/dev/sda, /dev/sdb, or anything in /dev/mapper. Getting a forensic dd
copy of the existing Windows installation is crucial if I'm going to
preserve all of the Lenovo support apps along with Windows 10. I've
used Keyfinder to record the Windows 10 activation key, but using the
generic installation DVD won't allow me to migrate the full
pre-installed Windows 10 Pro with the Lenovo support apps to a
virtual machine.

     (c) While the Fedora-MATE-Compiz live spin doesn't come up correctly,
I don't know if that's due to a compatibility problem with the GPU or
4K display, the Intel RAID controller, or something else. It can boot
to the Troubleshooting base video mode (init 2), but it won't go to
full graphical mode (init 5). I don't want to try the full Fedora 29
Workstation installation DVD before solving the Clonezilla problem.

Stay tuned for further developments.

--Doc
Robert G. (Doc) Savage
Fairview Heights, IL

"Perfection is the enemy of good enough."
          -- Admiral of the Fleet Sergei G. Gorshkov

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