BSD Still Won't Run on IBM ThinkPads? 54
omega_cubed asks: "'You've successfully installed FreeBSD, now your computer is going to hang at boot up!' -- That was what I just recently suffered. I've been running Mandrake on my ThinkPad X20 for almost a year. But the lack of high speed internet connection over the summer prevented me from keeping up with the various patches/updates. Many services--sendmail, apache, etc.--were shutdown one by one because of security vulnerabilities. Recently I decided that instead of trying to catch all those patches I missed in the last few months, I might just as well do a clean install of FreeBSD. I've done what I think was all the preparations necessary: I backed-up all my files, checked all the hardwares for possible conflicts (on FreeBSD.org) and supports, downloaded the ISO image. And I decided the computer should be able to take it. Unfortunately, I didn't come across the old slashdot article reporting a possible conflict between IBM ThinkPad's BIOS and FreeBSD's filesystem. So last night, after much struggling, I installed FreeBSD. It finished, rebooted, and the computer now just hangs at bootup (here's a more detailed report on what happened). It doesn't even go into BIOS. Does anyone have experience dealing with this? Is there anyway I can update the BIOS? The diskettes provided IBM were not able to boot the computer, and I am at a loss here. Thanks."
Nothing to do with the OS (Score:3, Informative)
Google is your friend (Score:5, Informative)
You might want to remove the hard drive, and see what happens when you boot it without a hard drive in. Maybe this will give you some sort of clue on what is wrong with it.
If your absolutely have to, buy a 2.5" hard drive adapter for your desktop machine. You can then format the laptop hard drive from that.
Remove Hard Disk (Score:3, Informative)
If the floppies still don't work, you have more to worry about than the HD.....
If they do work, flash the BIOS, and be happy on your way...
good luck!
Hm? (Score:3, Informative)
If I remember correctly, I think I blew away the restore partition before the installation, but I didn't screw around with the BIOS at all.
Am very curious as to what might be causing your problem.
Re:Nothing to do with the OS (Score:2, Informative)
That used to be the case, but many modern BIOSs now have more integration with the OS than previously.
In this example, the IBM Thinkpad BIOS is confusing the BSD disk partition with a special partition used for waking from hibernation.
Re:Nothing to do with the OS (Score:5, Informative)
Not being able to get into the BIOS or updating the BIOS has nothing to do with the OS installed.
---snip
Actually, in this case it does. The BIOS in many modern laptops (and in some desktops) has a built in suspend-to-disk routine. When being powered up, they check the harddrive for the image they saved last time they shutdown. The FreeBSD partition happens to look like a suspend image to the ThinkPad BIOS.
Dual booting Win2K and FreeBSD on a T21 (Score:3, Informative)
The only two things that I can't get to work under FreeBSD (starting from 4.5-RELEASE through 4.7-RC) is the Intel/Lucent Mini-PCI card (10/100 Eth + modem) and the integrated audio. I don't have any CardBus cards that I need to use with the laptop, so no worries for me there.
A couple of things to try is to update the firmware to the latest version, check to see if there are any hard drive firmware updates, and try to disable anything that you don't really need in the BIOS. Did that with mine and it works great. No if only I can chuck Win2K off of the hard drive permanently (I need to use the Shiva VPN client and other Windows-only tools for work... grr).
No problems running FBSD on a thinkpad (Score:3, Informative)
Might want to check your APM settings in the BIOS. with how to suspsend your lappy.
Re:Nothing to do with the OS (Score:3, Informative)
What you may be thinking of is the CMOS - which is in and of itself a separate piece of hardware.
No, not really... (Score:3, Informative)
The BIOS itself is still in ROM. If the BIOS was only on disk, you'd have a Catch-22; the BIOS would be needed to load itself from disk. (Well, I guess the system could have a second BIOS in ROM to load the first one from disk, but then, what would be the point of the BIOS on disk if there was already one in ROM?)
Anyway, while you can't "get into the BIOS [setup]" on those Compaqs without the hard drive connected, you can update the BIOS by booting from a flash-update disk. The BIOS setup program, although probably matched to the particular version of the BIOS on the ROM, doesn't need to be there just to flash the ROM.
Now, the problem with these particular IBM BIOSes is that, as soon as they're powered on, they see what they interpret to be a suspend-to-disk partition on the HD and try to load it to RAM and run it, without giving the user the opportunity to ignore the partition, or to run the bios setup program, etc. With the system in that state, not only can the user not boot off a floppy to repartition, but they can't even boot off a floppy to flash a new BIOS that doesn't try to resume like that onto the system.
Now, yes, you need a working BIOS if you want to boot off a floppy disk to flash-update your BIOS. And if for some reason the copy of the BIOS on the ROM won't work with disks anymore, the only solution is to yank the BIOS ROM chip off the motherboard and either fix it with a programmer and put it back on, or replace it with another chip.
But when you think about it, as the 2nd parent post suggests, if IBM releases a new BIOS for the malfunctioning systems that doesn't try to do the resuming, it's still possible to install it by unplugging the HD, booting off a flash-update floppy through the old BIOS (which will work fine as long as the hard drive with incompatible partitioning isn't attached) and doing the update, and then plugging in the hard drive again.
Any fairly new PC-land techies out there reading this still confused? I imagine that this particular hole exists in a lot of these peoples' backgrounds nowadays. So, it's time for:
Pre-boot PC Software Guts for Newbies
Terminology time.
(Assume I'm talking about x86 "IBM-compatible" PCs, unless I say otherwise.)
BIOS stands for Basic Input-Output System, which is a fancy name for a bunch of standardized routines that can be called to do things with the hardware (everything from hard drive access to keyboard input and more), and includes the Power-On Self Test (POST), the first thing that runs when you turn on your system (the thing that, if all the tests are passed, tries to load an operating system, and if not, brings you oh-so-useful error messages like the infamous "No keyboard attached. Press [F1] to continue.") Usually the BIOS routines have minimal functionality and sacrifice performance for compatibility. Also, these routines aren't really designed with modern operating system features (like memory management and multitasking) in mind. Because of this, once the POST passes control to the operating system, virtually all post-DOS ones only use the BIOS routines for as long as it takes to load more advanced drivers from the hard disk, and then they start using those drivers to run the hardware instead. The PC BIOS spec is very crufty; it contains a lot of routines that don't make any sense for even later DOS-era systems. (e.g. Bonus points for anyone who can explain how to get their post-2001 BIOS to display a "No ROM Basic, System Halted" message, and quadruple bonus points for someone who can produce a post-2001 BIOS that has a working ROM Basic of some sort hacked on. =) ). The BIOS is typically stored on a ROM (read-only memory) chip, although in recent times it's usually a flash-updateable ROM chip, so maybe the term "ROM" is a bit misleading.
CMOS stands for Complementary Metal-Oxide Semiconductor (if I remember correctly), which is a type of memory technology used in computers; but on PCs, CMOS has also misleadingly come to refer to a particular small hunk of battery-backed CMOS used to store some system settings. This kind of system data area is much more sensibly referred to as PRAM (Parameter RAM) on Macs and NVRAM (Non-Volatile RAM) on more proprietary unix workstations.