Installing FreeBSD on a Acer Aspire

errandonea · #1 September 8th, 2011, 08:08

Hello,

I'm trying to install FreeBSD on my desktop, which is a Acer Aspire AM3400, with a 64 bits CPU. But it doesn't even boot. As soon as the kernel starts to load, I hear a beep and the system immediatly reboots. I faced the same problem with OpenSolaris but not with Linux.

So, I was about to think this hardware was not supported. But the i386 version of FreeBSD runs fine under VirtualBox on the same computer. So I think there must be a way to make it boot on the real system, perhaps by changing something in the BIOS settings.

Any idea ?

**wblock@** · #2 September 8th, 2011, 14:35

So it gets past the loader menu? Try with ACPI disabled, or "safe mode".

errandonea · #3 September 8th, 2011, 16:42

No, the problem occurs before that menu appears. I switch on the computer. It prints "CD Loader" and a little more text. A / starts to turn round. And whoop ! Half a second later, the computer beeps and reboots.

davidgurvich · #4 September 8th, 2011, 17:18

FreeBSD should be able to boot. Have you tried with AHCI enabled/disabled in the BIOS? How are you trying to boot FreeBSD and which version? I've had the same issue with the usb image when I forget to zero out the start.

errandonea · #5 September 8th, 2011, 18:36

I'm trying to install FreeBSD 8.2 with the DVD. I tried both i386 and amd64. Under VirtualBox, only i386 works. On the real system, none did.

In the BIOS menu, there's a setting called "Onboard SATA Mode" with 3 possible options : RAID, AHCI and Native IDE. By default, RAID was selected. Following your advice, I switched to AHCI. Here's what happened : Windows was no longer able to boot. With FreeBSD's DVD, the following text appeared on the screen :

Code:

CD Loader 1.2
Building the boot loader arguments
Looking up /BOOT/LOADER...Found
/

And ... that's all ! The / continued to turn again and again during a few minutes with nothing else happening, until I decided to try something else.

I returned to the BIOS menu and selected the third option : Native IDE.

That way, FreeBSD boots, even the 64 bits version. But Windows doesn't. I wanted a dual-boot with Windows and FreeBSD but it seems I will have to change the BIOS settings each time I want to switch from FreeBSD to Windows or from Windows to FreeBSD.

So, thanks for your help but I hope a better solution exists, one that would suit both FreeBSD and Windows.

**wblock@** · #6 September 8th, 2011, 19:47

Set the BIOS back to the way it was and try a FreeBSD 9 install CD.

errandonea · #7 September 9th, 2011, 08:48

I did this : I set the BIOS option back to RAID and tried the CD of FreeBSD 9.0 beta 2 amd64. It doesn't boot. The problem is exactly the same I faced with FreeBSD 8.2.

Now that FreeBSD 8.2 is installed on my computer, I also tried to boot it directly from my hard disk. But with the RAID option, it doesn't work at all.

Since I can now access FreeBSD settings, can I change something to make it work with the RAID configuration ?

**wblock@** · #8 September 9th, 2011, 15:12

Label the filesystems in case it comes up with different disk names for RAID and non-RAID. Hard to tell exactly what that BIOS option is doing, though. The motherboard manual might describe it.

errandonea · #9 September 10th, 2011, 07:55

I tried to follow the how-to you showed me and label my slices. First, I checked /etc/fstab :

Code:

# Device                Mountpoint      FStype  Options         Dump    Pass#
/dev/ad1s1b             none            swap    sw              0       0
/dev/ad1s1a             /               ufs     rw              1       1
/dev/ad1s1e             /tmp            ufs     rw              2       2
/dev/ad1s1f             /usr            ufs     rw              2       2
/dev/ad1s1d             /var            ufs     rw              2       2
/dev/acd0               /cdrom          cd9660  ro,noauto       0       0

So, after booting in single-user mode, I labeled :

Code:

# glabel label acswap /dev/ad1s1b
# tunefs -L acrootfs /dev/ad1s1a
# tunefs -L acvarfs /dev/ad1s1d
# tunefs -L actmpfs /dev/ad1s1e
# tunefs -L acusrfs /dev/ad1s1f

No error message. No output at all. It seemed the work was done.

I rebooted in multi-user mode. But when I checked /dev/label and /dev/ufs, I discovered these folders were empty. Of course, I stopped here and didn't ask /etc/fstab to point to non-existent files like /dev/ufs/acrootfs, for example. Where did I went wrong ?

**wblock@** · #10 September 10th, 2011, 13:43

Quote:

Originally Posted by errandonea

I rebooted in multi-user mode. But when I checked /dev/label and /dev/ufs, I discovered these folders were empty. Of course, I stopped here and didn't ask /etc/fstab to point to non-existent files like /dev/ufs/acrootfs, for example. Where did I went wrong ?

Can't think of any way to do that, except maybe disabling /dev by booting in "safe mode" or single user.

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The Following User Says Thank You to davidgurvich For This Useful Post:
errandonea (September 8th, 2011)