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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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