From owner-freebsd-stable Thu Nov 30 10:21:48 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from mobile.wemm.org (adsl-64-163-195-99.dsl.snfc21.pacbell.net [64.163.195.99]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 00B9F37B401 for ; Thu, 30 Nov 2000 10:21:46 -0800 (PST) Received: from netplex.com.au (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by mobile.wemm.org (8.11.1/8.11.1) with ESMTP id eAUILZD98698; Thu, 30 Nov 2000 10:21:39 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from peter@netplex.com.au) Message-Id: <200011301821.eAUILZD98698@mobile.wemm.org> X-Mailer: exmh version 2.2 06/23/2000 with nmh-1.0.4 To: Gunnar Flygt Cc: FreeBSD Stable Subject: Re: Can this really be true? FreeBSD not working on IBM T20's In-Reply-To: <20001130180724.A45345@sr.se> Date: Thu, 30 Nov 2000 10:21:35 -0800 From: Peter Wemm Sender: owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Gunnar Flygt wrote: > Is this really the situation, that FreeBSD is not booting on the latest > IBM thinkpads? That would really be a pity, since I was going to buy > such a nice little beast after newyear. > > http://bsdtoday.com/2000/November/News342.html No, it isn't a case of FreeBSD "not booting" - installing FreeBSD on the laptop causes the BIOS to lock up solid and never even get around to running the boot code in the MBR etc. You have to take the drive out of the *20 series. You cannot boot from floppy, CD, anything.. You cannot even get into the BIOS setup. The only way to recover is to either take the drive out, attach an IDE adapter and boot it on another machine to zero the disk, or put the drive in another thinkpad and boot it there and nuke it from within freebsd. If you do not have an adaptor or a second older thinkpad, then the only option is to return it for repair. There are several theories about what is going on. One item worthy of note is that if the FreeBSD partition is not marked "active", then there is no problem. Also, somebody (dcs?) has commented that it doesn't have to be patition ID 165 - apparently the bios has a list of *known* partition types and it is choking on the first *unknown* (to it) fdisk partition. Whatever the case, it is a BIOS bug. There is no excuse for the bios to be unable to go into bios setup mode. Cheers, -Peter -- Peter Wemm - peter@FreeBSD.org; peter@yahoo-inc.com; peter@netplex.com.au "All of this is for nothing if we don't go to the stars" - JMS/B5 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message