Date: Mon, 04 Dec 2000 13:34:01 -0800 From: Ken Key <key@network-alchemy.com> To: bmah@cisco.com Cc: Ken Key <key@network-alchemy.com>, freebsd-mobile@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Continuing ThinkPad saga Message-ID: <200012042134.NAA56830@sodium.cips.nokia.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of Mon, 04 Dec 2000 10:15:15 -0800. <200012041815.eB4IFFx67945@bmah-freebsd-0.cisco.com>
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> If memory serves me right, Ken Key wrote: > > The broken T20's BIOS should have read v1.08a (IYET45WW) - sorry for > > the typo. The BIOS on the other working T20 is v1.03 (IYET37WW). > > Hi Ken-- > > I've got a T20, type 2647-86W, with BIOS 1.03 (IYET37WW). Given your > comment above, you'd think that I should have no problems... > unfortunately I bricked it yesterday after installing 4.2-RELEASE. > Interesting. The two that worked, including the one with the same BIOS rev., were Win98SE preinstalls. The one I tried that failed (v1.08a) was a Win2K preinstall like yours. I also used Partition Magic, like you. I used BootMagic, though, rather than boot0. I never saw a "big hidden FAT16" parition, only a single FAT32 that I shrunk via PM. The next question to be asked is what would happen if I used FreeBSD only with no Win2K on the machine. I didn't try this on the T20, but on the T21 it still bricked. I don't think I'll get around to trying it on the T20 as my day job is calling me as well. > boot0 appears perfectly capable of loading Win2K on > this machine. Yup, once I got rid of the 0xA5 partition, I could use PM or boot0 to boot the Win2K. > So I'm real curious to see why two different machines with the same > firmware behave differently. Is there any chance of finding out what > the partition table for your T20 with BIOS 1.03 is? I've got a request for the fdisk output, but I believe it is simply: ad0s1 FAT32/Win98 ad0s2 FreeBSD > In another thread, Peter Wemm suggested that maybe we could have our > boot1 handle other partition types in addition to our 0xA5. In my > Copious Spare Time, I'm going to see if I can make up boot blocks that > do this (doesn't seem too hard to do, although I haven't figured out how > to get the boot blocks over to the ThinkPad yet). Problem is...I'm need > to be doing Real Work (TM) for $VBRC today. :-p I started down that path but gave up. I decided that even if I did get it to work on a different partition number, trying to support this hack on all the FreeBSD laptops (20+) in my organization would kill my sysadmin staff during upgrades and installs by newbies who weren't aware of the issues. I cancelled my order and ordered other laptops instead. If you do try to do this, note that 0xA5 is hardcoded in boot/i386/boot0/ boot0.s, and boot2/boot1.s. You'll also need to change DOSPTYP_386BSD in both /usr/include/sys/disklabel.h and (I think this is where I made my mistake) in i386/include/pc/msdos.h. I never got it to work, but that was because I gave up after deciding the above. Regards, K^2 -- Ken Key (key@cips.nokia.com, key@Network-Alchemy.com) Nokia, Clustered IP Solutions, Santa Cruz, CA To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-mobile" in the body of the message
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