A bizarre post-installation experience!

K

kjpetrie

I have an old Acer 5810T laptop with a non-functioning display which I decided to repurpose as a spare FreeBSD server, so I replaced the CMOS battery, plugged in a VGA monitor, and set the BIOS settings to what I thought would be appropriate for a machine with no GUI and installed FreeBSD-RELEASE-15.1. I was pleased to see the WiFi was recognised without installing anything else and set up the network to finish the installation. Then came the big moment. I rebooted and the machine settled onto a screen giving me the option of pressing F2 to enter set-up or F12 to select a boot device, and there it sat. It will not respond to any keys, not even the two mentioned above, except to bleep if keys are pressed too many times. I removed the charger and both batteries, shorting the terminals for good measure, then reassembled everything. There were now changes in that the text-only boot screen I had earlier selected was now graphical and the F12 option was gone, since that was also something I'd selected in set-up, but still things went no further.

What? How can installing anything to the HDD stop the BIOS working? I suppose the only way to check is to remove the HDD and see if I can boot the BIOS set-up without it, so that's exactly what I did and I have now been able to boot into the BIOS set-up. How bizarre is that? Now I have to work out how to clear the installation off the HDD so I can start again!

This shouldn't be possible! I can only assume the current drive configuration sends POST into a loop or hang of some kind.

Update: I put the drive in another machine and changed the partitioning scheme from msdos to gpt. This effectively wiped it. After that I could get into BIOS and set things up before repeating the installation. This time I didn't accept the suggested partitions but made a point of creating an efi partition on the HDD. It seems the installer sees the efi partition on the USB stick and uses that instead of creating one on the HDD, so when the BIOS tries to examine its boot environment from the hard drive it can't find one, gets confused, and becomes unresponsive.
 
Nothing. It's all working now (apart from the display which is why I stopped using it as a laptop). This is not a help thread. It's the Off-Topic area. If I'd wanted help I'd have posted in Installing and Upgrading FreeBSD or Systems Hardware.
 
kjpetrie said:
Nothing. It's all working now (apart from the display which is why I stopped using it as a laptop). This is not a help thread. It's the Off-Topic area. If I'd wanted help I'd have posted in Installing and Upgrading FreeBSD or Systems Hardware.
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I thought the bootloader or partition table was wasted by some install procedure...
 
The BIOS describes itself on its boot splash as "EFI BIOS" and the two things I did to fix the problem were change the partitioning scheme from msdos to GPT and create an efi partition manually because the installer didn't. Given the age of the machine I would have thought it could cope with msdos partitioning but it obviously disliked what the installer originally did so much it refused even to allow the set-up or boot drive selection processes to run and just froze on that splash screen while the hard drive was in there.

I don't know which of my changes got it working again because changing to GPT obviously destroyed the partition table as well. Frankly, though it's interesting, I don't care enough to experiment and risk losing the installation I'm now working with.
 
DerTeufel said:
As this is a BIOS machine, it will load the binary in sector 0. You can only wipe that by intentionally wiping this area, not by deleting partitions etc.
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Something with root permissions that overwrites /boot/boot0 or links a different file to it that's not the start of the device?
 
But by the time it does that, it's beyond the F2/F12 stage and already chosen the boot device, so that can't be it.

It's a mystery and will have to remain so because I'm not going back to investigate further so unless anyone has an identical machine to test we'll never know.
 
kjpetrie said:
But by the time it does that, it's beyond the F2/F12 stage and already chosen the boot device, so that can't be it.

It's a mystery and will have to remain so because I'm not going back to investigate further so unless anyone has an identical machine to test we'll never know.
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F2/F12 is Acer BIOS standard. If the following 512 bytes of bootloader is no valid executable, I think that can result in a freezing system or a reset-loop.
It happens if you replace /boot with something else because the original /boot/boot0 is a hard link to the start of the disk.
 
kjpetrie said:
The BIOS describes itself on its boot splash as "EFI BIOS"
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That is odd for such an old Core 2 Duo machine, but if it is EFI, it will look for the EFI system partition. If you delete the partition table, the partition is gone (not the data, but the definition), so it does not try to boot the generic loader (bootx64.efi) from it. Also check the boot manager entries with efibootmgr.
 
kjpetrie said:
so I replaced the CMOS battery
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so it means you wiped the BIOS to it's default settings
your HDD was surely recognized or you just couldn't partition and install the system as mentioned
but was it the default boot device in boot order in the BIOS? was it even there in the list?
If you removed the USB and the system doesn't start it's something like having no HDD at all but you would be able to reach BIOS.
If not it's like there's a unrecognized device, bad memory in the slot or the HDD was not properly plugged may cause such behavior.
The fact of moving the HDD to another system and plug it back again without doing absolutely nothing to it could be enough to fix that.
I remember having a old lap, I still have a old laptop by the way, but I didn't have the HDD screws so it was a little loose inside the laptop and sometimes the system doesn't start just because I picked the laptop and moved it to another room.
That's an old laptop I would also consider checking if your HDD for bad sectors or your server may not last long.

Good you fixed it.
 
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