asus n50v express gate

synack

synack

Hi,

I have an asus n50v that I am planing on installing FreeBSD on. The laptop has two power buttons', one to boot the operating system and the other to boot into expressgate. I have had a look at the disk and expressgate is not installed on the HD, I'm pretty sure it's on a rom on the motherboard, but I could be wrong..

As usual the laptop came with windows installed by default. I went ahead and installed FreeBSD and installed the boot manager to the mbr. This hosed the windows boot manager and after I had done the install I was no longer able to boot into expressgate using the second power button, which leaves me to believe that the mbr installed by the manufacturer has the information to boot expressgate. I know this because the HD failed while it was under warranty and sent back to the manufacturer, it came back with windows installed with the windows boot manager on the mbr... plus expressgate worked again.

Does anyone here have an asus laptop with expressgate that has got it working with freebsd? Is there a way for me to get the contents' of the windows boot manager so that I can keep expressgate working when I have installed freebsd?

hope this message is not too convoluted,

thanks,

Brett.
 
Expressgate is Splashtop "rebranded" by Asus. It supposed to be embedded in a mobo chip and do not depend on any bootmanager, only on BIOS.
On my desktop it used to fire up even before GAG boot manager residing on MBR instead of windows bootloader.
By definition FreeBSD cannot prevent Expressgate from booting but who knows what windozenese are capable of. I also remember that it required 500MB of windows partition (or its own partition - forgot) but I chose to live any "gates" free and disable it in BIOS:)
Can you access your BIOS?
 
Windows bootloader (vista for sure) is able to boot FreeBSD.
Since I'm far from this matter I don't know how but if you google and search this forum you can find how. Another forum to search: http://www.daemonforums.org - they have even Windows talk (Other OS).
I meant sometimes weird things happen and BIOS settings get changed somehow. Does Expressway still enabled in BIOS? Do you still have those 500MB on your HDD?
PS. My wife has a laptop with non-accessible BIOS (just no means to get to setup), I used to have a laptop with very limited BIOS access and had to take it apart and pull out the battery) so you are lucky if you can access your BIOS :)
 
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