Fixing malignantly stupid ubuntu linux and windows XP on a thinkpad

I've wasted two days trying to get any of my thinkpad laptops to drive some stepper motors. Both windows and linux have behaved like inbred meth heads when it comes to doing simple things they should handle.

Windows

I was having issues making the parallel port work. One suggestion was to change the "ACPI" option to "Standard PC" from it's current setting.

Easy enough. Seemed completely harmless since "Standard PC" seems less tricky than whatever was in there to begin with.

I did it.

Reboot.

Windows crashes.

Reboot

Crashes

Reboot in "Safe mode"

Crashes

Reboot in "last stable configuration"

Crashes.

Reboot in with recovery CD.

Can't recognize harddrive.

Mount the windows file system in linux. Copy a bunch of DLLs over to try to revert thing. Crashes.

Finally, the sysadmin here changed the "Serial ATA" setting in the BIOS to be "Compatability" rather than ATA.

Now the recovery CD could recognize the drive.

Reinstall. Freezes since I need a product key and the one on my laptop doesn't work.

Track down what it wants (what an insult given that it fucked up!)

Continue.

Things now work.

Linux

Linux is not necessarily any better.

Since windows blew up I installed the ubuntu linux distribution to try out EMC2 (a CNC program). The installation went fine.

Reboot.

Boot loader cannot recognize the harddriver! WTF! (Grub: error 18)

I spent around 4 hours trying to get something to work. Even trying to do a complete reinstall of windows using a rescue CD failed w/ errors that it couldn't find the harddrive.

Fixing ubuntu's complete stupidity turns out to not take many key strokes in the end:

1. You need to get into the "BIOS" to change a setting: reboot your laptop
2. Hold down one of the function keys (F1 works for me)
3. It will take you to a configuration screen
4. Select "security"
5. Set the "hide disk area" option to "disabled"
6. Reboot.
7. Should work.