Date: Tue, 19 Sep 2000 19:43:23 -0700 From: Dave Haas <dave@netguy.org> To: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: RE: IBM Thinkpad T20 rejects FreeBSD Was: FreeBSD 4.1 on IBM Thi nkpad T20 Message-ID: <B17EB4955925D4118CF0006097C59E4901AFA1@PDC>
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I've had the same problem on my T20. The system came pre-installed with Win2K, which I dumped for RedHat, which I dumped for FreeBSD 4.1-RELEASE. During the install I partitioned half the drive, planning to install Win2K on the remaining half. I opted for BootMgr for OS boot-time management. After the FreeBSD install completed, the computer was useless. Couldn't boot from floppy, CD, or hard drive. Couldn't enter BIOS Setup, couldn't F12 into boot device options. If I removed the hard drive I was able to boot from floppy, cd, enter BIOS, etc. Put the drive back in, dead. I had IBM ship me a second, virgin hard drive. On the second drive I partitioned the first half of the drive and installed Win2KPro. I worked perfectly through multiple reboots. Later that day I did another FreeBSD install. I used the remaining half of the hard drive, partitioned it, again chose BootMgr for OS boot-time selection. After the FreeBSD installation completed I rebooted. Once again the laptop was unusuable. Same exact behavior as described above. Presently the only way I've found to make the drives usuable again was to plug the Thinkpad hard drives into my desktop system using a 44-to-40 pin adapter. Once the drives were were installed in my desktop system I was able to boot from both drives. BootMgr worked correctly. Both operating systems worked perfectly. I was able to recover data from Win2K. After recovering data I used traditional methods for making the drives bootable again (reinstalling OSes, fdisk, fdisk /mbr, reformat, etc). None of these methods made the drives bootable in the Thinkpad, but at least the laptop reported back with an "operating system not found" error instead of being wholly unusable. I was finally able to boot from the T20 floppy, and in the end I was forced to use a hard drive wipe program (wipe.com) which wrote zeroes to the first 8GB of the hard drive. Post wipe, Win2K installed and booted successfully. The rep at IBM Tech Support claims that IBM is aware of this problem. He claimed that FreeBSD was "writing the boot sector somewhere above the usual boot sector location". His explanation doesn't make sense, and he was unable to provide me with any specifics... Dave Haas, Director of Network Operations daveh@bootlegnetworks.com --or-- dave@netguy.org -----Original Message----- From: Garance A Drosihn [mailto:drosih@rpi.edu] Sent: Tuesday, September 19, 2000 11:01 AM To: Jonas Bulow; freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: IBM Thinkpad T20 rejects FreeBSD Was: FreeBSD 4.1 on IBM Thinkpad T20 At 4:15 PM +0200 9/19/00, Jonas Bulow wrote: >A follow-up on my own problem. > >The T20 does not allow a partition type of 165. If I change >it to 131 (ext2fs) the computer boots fine. Otherwise, as I >explained earlier, the computer hangs before it is even >possible to enter the bios setup. > >Does anyone on this list use a IBM thinkpad T20 or A20 with FreeBSD? This is mighty hard to believe. Here at RPI, the T20 was chosen as the laptop for this year's incoming freshmen. While there are some hurdles in getting freebsd running on those laptops, those hurdles were in the "standard places" for hurdles. The T20's have a new type of ethernet card, so freebsd couldn't talk to the network. There is also some new graphics controller, so you have to have a customized version of the XFree86 server to work with it. Our own Jon Chen (a grad student here at RPI) got a patch together for the ethernet card to work. I think he's also been messaging the Xserver so it's more reliable. I'm afraid that I don't know all the details, but I do know that about three weeks ago we did have about 30-60 T20 owners up and running on FreeBSD. The idea that a laptop would not BOOT due to the partition type seems pretty strange to me. At no time did we have trouble with the T20's booting. I should probably note, however, that we were not doing a freebsd-only setup, so I don't know how well that would work. What we did was use partition-magic to shrink the Win98 partition, and then install freebsd into the second partition. That seemed to work fine. --- Garance Alistair Drosehn = gad@eclipse.acs.rpi.edu Senior Systems Programmer or drosih@rpi.edu Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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