Boot failure

P

panzer

Hi.

I am trying to install FreeBSD 8.0 (also tried 7.2) on a laptop with an AMD Turion 64 X2 processor but it wont even boot the kernel.

I have tried with the FreeBSD amd64 bootonly images. Just for fun I also tried the i386 bootonly image and it actually booted into the menu fine, but crashed when I selected anything. The amd64 images show a couple of lines from the bootloader but once they load the kernel they just start filling the screen with some lines ala:
"esi 0990x89x08x09x09x098x098x"

I am not actually sure what is being printed on the screen except that it is a couple of lines being printed in a never ending loop, and they run down the screen to quickly for me to actually see what it says.

Also tried installing Ubuntu, and it works fine. So the machine is working. In some sense at least. The machine is actually just the hardware from an old Medion laptop and I have removed stuff I don't need (wireless, for instance).

Anyone have some ideas on how I can analyse the problem further? I'd rather not end up running Ubuntu on the thing :p
 
I have attached the dmesg output I got from when running Ubuntu on the box. The only issue I spotted is:
Code: 
[    0.000000] Phoenix BIOS detected: BIOS may corrupt low RAM, working around it.

Maybe this could be part of the problem?
 
Argh, the file was too big and didn't get attached. Well the only issue in the file was the thing about the Phoenix BIOS.

And why can't I edit my own posts? This self-replying really annoys me.
 
Total Boot Failure

I tried to install Free BSD 8.0-RELEASE-amd64-disc1 on the second hard drive on my HP HDX 18 laptop today. I thought I had succeeded but on trying to reboot my laptop I only get the HP logo and a message "Press the ESC Key for Startup Menu". Pressing the ESC key has no effect, nor will the laptop start from a CD.

Any advice ?
 
dj777: It wont start from a CD? But it did it earlier when you installed FreeBSD, right? That sounds really weird.

The boot problem could be due to a faulty boot loader setup. But if you can't even get it to boot from a CD anymore, I think it is something else. Can you get into the BIOS and make sure that it boots via CD first?
 
Apparently the problem has occurred before. "satkitten", in an HP Business Support Forum, describes the same difficulty which he (she) apparently fixed by juggling with two, or perhaps three, hard drives on two different computers. I don't yet feel brave enough to try this.
 
Solved.

Ok, finally got FreeBSD installed. It was a bug in the BIOS that caused all my problems. If I setup the BIOS to automatically boot from a CD (or later, after the installation, from disk) then it will fail miserably. The way I got around it was by hitting F12 on boot; this causes a menu to be shown that allows me to choose which device to boot from. If I select CD (or disk) from this menu then everything boots fine. Apparently the normal boot sequence messes up the memory in some way. I would have tried to get a newer BIOS version but Phoenix Technologies does not make them freely available on their site but instead wants you to download a Windows application that checks your BIOS version etc and finds the correct version for you (or something like that, I haven't actually tried the program).

The bug of course means that I have to be there every time I reboot to manually press F12 and then select the correct boot device. This is however not a problem in my case since it is a server I am building and I have no intention of rebooting that very often ;)
 
dj777: So is your computer bricked at the moment? Or can you still boot into whatever is on the first disk?
 
Yes, I have two hard drives. If I remove the hard drive with Free BSD physically I can boot from a CD with grub on it and then using the grub chainloader I can boot Vista 64 from the first hard drive, repair the MBR with bootrec.exe and so make Vista usable as normal. However when I replace the second hard drive containing the Free BSD installation the original problem recurs: the machine is unusable.
 
Remove the Vista disk, replace it with the BSD disk,
install GAG to the BSD disk, replace both, boot to
the GAG bootloader ?? (Guessing...)
 
Total Boot Failure

I tried that but it did not help. My HP HDX18 did not boot. But all is now well. I placed my second hard disk (the one with Free BSD on it ) in a device called ICY BOX which was connected to my HP via a USB cable. I could then boot from a CD containing "gparted" which showed that the BSD partition had the boot flag set. I cancelled this flag and the problem disappeared.

Thanks to all for the help given, especially the "sitkitten ?" on the HP forum.
 
Same HDX18 problem as dj777

Wish I would have read this post first to save myself the heartache. I have a HDX18t HP laptop and decided to try FreeBSD today and now have the same problem as dj777 did. Looks like I'll be making a trip to the store tomorrow to buy a hard drive/usb enclosure kit because it looks like there's no other option here. This sounds more like a BIOS problem. :(
 
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