Date: Thu, 16 Feb 2012 20:08:14 +0200 From: Rares Aioanei <bsdlisten@gmail.com> To: Alex Goncharov <alex-goncharov@comcast.net> Cc: freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: 8 to 9: A longer wait early in the boot of a (damaged) Compaq Presario Message-ID: <4F3D460E.7090507@gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <E1Ry5E4-000HRq-ED@hans3> References: <E1Ry5E4-000HRq-ED@hans3>
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On 02/16/2012 07:34 PM, Alex Goncharov wrote: > About three years ago, my Compaq Presario F700 notebook got "damaged > in BIOS": it carried Windows Vista then, and that OS could not be > recovered from the system image disks I had created for a brand-new > machine. The damage was somewhere around BIOS/firmware area -- the > way the console looked on a bootup looked differently (simpler) now > that after several reboots trying to recover Vista, it got fried. > > Some googling told me then that the irreversible loss of Windows was > not unusual for these Compaq machines -- the damaged systems didn't > give one a chance to use the recovery disks. > > OK, I made the system dual bootable to Debian Linux and FreeBSD 8 > then; with that, it booted all right, but in both cases the 'nfe0' > interface Ethernet address was being set to 0. No big deal: I used an > Ethernet address from my older laptop destined to be destroyed and > gave it to 'nfe0' when setting the network interface properties at the > system initialization. Works great, both in Debian and FreeBSD. > > There was one other odd thing that I noticed then: while Debian booted > without a delay, FreeBSD 8 made a long pause after passing the boot > menu: it would display the '/' character and sit there for some > non-trivial amount of seconds. I assumed that it was doing some BIOS > querying, and with BIOS (firmware?) being damaged, it took the system > some time to figure things out... perhaps it was re-querying BIOS, > seeing the insane value of 0 for an interface's Ethernet address (I > have many machines running FreeBSD, including multiple laptops, and I get the same on my HP Pavilion dv9750 laptop, but with an intact BIOS, afaict. And that happens regardless of the wi-fi card's state (eg disabled or enabled from the hardware button). Maybe this helps. -- Rares Aioanei
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