Red spots at top of screen when trying to boot FreeBSD

B

balanga

When I try to boot FreeBSD (or mfsBSD) on a newly acquired ThinkPad W520 I get a number of red marks right at the top of the screen and nothing else happens. I get the same on a ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 4(?).

Could it be something in the BIOS causing this?

I can boot normally from these disks in other systems.
 
Sounds rather strange. Earlier versions definitely run on the W520, for example see https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2022/04/14/freebsd-13-1-on-thinkpad-w520/
I've had no problem booting freebsd 13 and 14 on X200-series thinkpads.

I wonder if your boot media is corrupted? Try a different flash stick? But you say other systems boot ok from the same physical drive?

Hmm... BIOS version. Could be I suppose. You could try getting the latest bios from lenovo and installing that...

This thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/s5tiqp/w520_has_bios_v121_is_there_a_best_version_to/
 
blackbird9 said:
Sounds rather strange.
Click to expand...

Very very strange....

It looks like it must have had something to do with booting via Ventoy...

I've now tried booting up from an mfsBSD USB stick and it boots up OK.

When trying to use Ventoy, other systems booted up fine, it was just FreeBSD which displayed this problem.
 
Presumably the red marks at the top of the screen are because of someone writing erroneously to video framebuffer...
No good can come of this...
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top