Date: Thu, 11 Nov 2010 13:21:41 +0100 From: Markus Hoenicka <markus.hoenicka@mhoenicka.de> To: freebsd-mobile@freebsd.org Subject: Acer Travelmate 8371 bricked by installing FreeBSD? Message-ID: <20101111132141.49592qovwxlndt4w@webmail.df.eu>
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Hi all, feel free to consider me paranoid, but have laptop manufacturers managed to make their hardware depend on Windoze to boot at all? Full story: I purchased an Acer Travelmate 8371 and an external USB DVD burner as the 8371 does not have an optical drive. I started the box, and Windows asked me to finish the installation. Needless to say that I refused. I turned off the box, plugged in the DVD drive, and fiddled with the BIOS to allow me to boot from the DVD drive. In went a Knoppix CD (a live Linux CD) which started up fine. dmesg told me that it recognized all essential components of the laptop. Next I put in the FreeBSD 8.1 netinstall CD and rebooted. The installation of the basics went fine and showed no problems. I was bold enough to use the entire hard drive as the FreeBSD slice. This may be important as this may have removed any magic that Acer had put onto this drive (there were a bunch of partitions and non-assigned areas, only two of them NTFS partitions). In any case, when I attempted to reboot into the installed FreeBSD, the box no longer made it past the initial Acer splash screen. Neither F2 (edit BIOS settings) nor F12 (boot device menu) are responsive, only Ctl+Alt+Del and the power switch do have any effect. This left me with a brick, as none of the remedies that Google suggested (things like take out battery, unplug power cord, press mains switch for 30 sec, reattach power cord and boot) would get this box past the initial splash screen. Did anyone run into similar problems before? Is there any possibility that the box was indeed bricked by installing FreeBSD, or did I experience a bad hair day? any help is appreciated Markus -- Markus Hoenicka http://www.mhoenicka.de AQ score 38
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