This weekend in my BSD experiences I tried to install FreeBSD 12.2 into an old unbranded 2003 Intel Centrino M laptop 512Mb RAM but it did not go well ...
( I know beforehand that it might be needed the I386 iso and selected all the default installation choices )
The Laptop previously had installed Ubuntu , Windows , AntiX ...
The laptop BIOS is an Insyde BL050 , text interface only with option just to identify the machine devices ; change the timedate clock and change the devices boot order.
USB boot does not work so I am using the internal DVD reader to boot the system .
What I was not expecting was that after a apparently succesfull full HDD installation I got to a BIOS "bricked" machine...
After the install the BIOS froze in the first info screen right after POST, locking the system in the first screen ( even keyborad did not respond) .
At first I though because the HDD ( 20Gb Toshiba Hitachi IDE ) were so old that I had hardware fault .
Afterwards swapped HDDs ( 40Gb HDD ) and restarted the default install process again with the same behaviour ...
Another try with another HDD ( more "recent" 80GB ) also with the same behaviour ...
After the 3 failed install attempts, I become suspicious and thought "lets check externally the HDDs" ....
To my surprise all the HDDs were OK, all with a GPT partition table with 3 partitions .
As I have readed that some old BIOS did not like the GPT partition table, I wrote a simple empty MBR partition via GParted into one of the HDDs;
Put it ( HDD ) in the Laptop, and the system started correctly passing the POST BIOS screen, reporting as expected : No booting HDD found.
Afterwards tried to install ( always wiping the full HDD ) some other BSD flavours ( with some degree of sucess due to display issues ) but none of them locked me out as FreeBSD ...
Installed succesfully some recent Linux es ( 32bits kernel versions though ) ...
After some research in the forum I found several entries more or less related to this :
forums.freebsd.org
forums.freebsd.org
forums.freebsd.org
Besides choosing manually the shell and editing the HDD partitions, how in the installer can I define that I needed a MBR partition table ?
How come in the i386 section ( which is supposed to support legacy CPU architectures ) the default installation choices are the defined to the most "recent" ?
Sorry for the rant but I though that this detail could be solved by now ( Release 12 ) .
Thanks in advance
( I know beforehand that it might be needed the I386 iso and selected all the default installation choices )
The Laptop previously had installed Ubuntu , Windows , AntiX ...
The laptop BIOS is an Insyde BL050 , text interface only with option just to identify the machine devices ; change the timedate clock and change the devices boot order.
USB boot does not work so I am using the internal DVD reader to boot the system .
What I was not expecting was that after a apparently succesfull full HDD installation I got to a BIOS "bricked" machine...
After the install the BIOS froze in the first info screen right after POST, locking the system in the first screen ( even keyborad did not respond) .
At first I though because the HDD ( 20Gb Toshiba Hitachi IDE ) were so old that I had hardware fault .
Afterwards swapped HDDs ( 40Gb HDD ) and restarted the default install process again with the same behaviour ...
Another try with another HDD ( more "recent" 80GB ) also with the same behaviour ...
After the 3 failed install attempts, I become suspicious and thought "lets check externally the HDDs" ....
To my surprise all the HDDs were OK, all with a GPT partition table with 3 partitions .
As I have readed that some old BIOS did not like the GPT partition table, I wrote a simple empty MBR partition via GParted into one of the HDDs;
Put it ( HDD ) in the Laptop, and the system started correctly passing the POST BIOS screen, reporting as expected : No booting HDD found.
Afterwards tried to install ( always wiping the full HDD ) some other BSD flavours ( with some degree of sucess due to display issues ) but none of them locked me out as FreeBSD ...
Installed succesfully some recent Linux es ( 32bits kernel versions though ) ...
After some research in the forum I found several entries more or less related to this :
Install of 8-3-RELEASE renders hard drive unusable
This is a new one for me. I've used FreeBSD in the past (stopped March 28, 2009 when a port upgrade completely crashed my system). Anyway, this week, I was trying to access some files on my old system and thought I would install the latest release to move them to my current file system. I...
Installing FreeBSD 9 rendered hard drive unusable
Today I tried installing FreeBSD 9 (32-bit) on a machine which had been booting into Windows XP without any trouble. I went through the FreeBSD installer, took all the defaults, let FreeBSD take over the entire drive, and the install appeared to complete without any problems. I rebooted the...
FreeBSD-9.2-RELEASE-i386-dvd1.iso Trashed my Laptop
I have a Toshiba Satellite L35-S2171 laptop and I used this DVD (yes, I checked the md5 and it matched) to try FreeBSD out in Live mode and the first time I booted the DVD the boot process hung on the following line: pcib1: failed to allocate initial memory window: 0xc0000000-0xc00ffffff pci1...
Besides choosing manually the shell and editing the HDD partitions, how in the installer can I define that I needed a MBR partition table ?
How come in the i386 section ( which is supposed to support legacy CPU architectures ) the default installation choices are the defined to the most "recent" ?
Sorry for the rant but I though that this detail could be solved by now ( Release 12 ) .
Thanks in advance
