Date: Mon, 21 Aug 2006 18:20:31 -0400 (EDT) From: Jerry McAllister <jerrymc@clunix.cl.msu.edu> To: questions@freebsd.org Cc: Jerry McAllister <jerrymc@msu.edu> Subject: Installing on IBM Z61t Message-ID: <200608212220.k7LMKVGp001418@clunix.cl.msu.edu>
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Hi All, I am trying to set up a notebook computer for someone (I only have towers and rackmount servers running FreeBSD myself). The machine is an IBM Z61t Lenova with 2 GHz Intel CPU, 1 GB memory The BIOS version is 1.06 (7FET46WW) of 2006-04-27 I has an: ATAPI CD0:MATSHITADVD-RAM UK-842-(PM) cd/dvd reader/burner. I got a USB floppy and put it on too. The boot order in BIOS is currently CD, Floppy Hard disk I have switched floppy and CD a couple of times and removed a number of other thing from the boot order - mostly things that are not actually on the machine. I was able to boot Partition Magic with the USB floppy and fix up the hard disk to make room. I added a FAT32 (#3) slice and an undesignated slice (#4). I hoped to add FreeBSD to the undesignated slice and use the FAT32 for communication between WinXP and FreeBSD since the XP slice was NTFS. But, it will not boot the FreeBSD 6.1 installation CD - it completely ignores it and boots WinXP, even though it looks like it is enabled in the BIOS. It doesn't even seem to try booting the CD and fail. The BIOS doesn't appear to talk to it at all. That CD worked fine in another (deskside) machine - a Dell, by the way. I had no trouble doing an install with it on that machine. So, I made a set of 6.1 install floppies. Although the Partition Magic (several years old copy) floppies booted just fine, when I started to boot from the boot.flp floppy it read it and then started repeatedly dumping some message on the screen. It just kept scrolling up too fast to read. It looked like it might be 5 or 6 lines long. Just in case it was telling me to put in the kern1.flp, I did that and hit enter, but it did not stop scrolling what appeared to be the same message, nor did it appear to read that floppy at all. I have rummaged through the BIOS setup and not found anything that jumps out at me that I should turn on or off. I did not find anything that looked like 'plug n play'. So, my obvious question is: (questions are:) Is there any hope of installing FreeBSD on this notebook computer? Is there something I can turn on or off to make it work? Why will the old Partition Magic floppy work, but the new FreeBSD 6.1 not? Why doesn't the BIOS even attempt to check the CD for a boot sector, but just ignore it completely and boot the HD? Thanks for any clues or solid informatino, ////jerry
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