i386/79317: Freebsd Erasing NVRAM

[Brian Thompson]

>Number:         79317
>Category:       i386
>Synopsis:       Freebsd Erasing NVRAM
>Confidential:   no
>Severity:       non-critical
>Priority:       medium
>Responsible:    freebsd-i386
>State:          open
>Quarter:        
>Keywords:       
>Date-Required:
>Class:          sw-bug
>Submitter-Id:   current-users
>Arrival-Date:   Mon Mar 28 19:10:02 GMT 2005
>Closed-Date:
>Last-Modified:
>Originator:     Brian Thompson
>Release:        5.3, 5.4
>Organization:
>Environment:
I have already but different distro.
>Description:
The problem is that something in FreeBSD is erasing the NVRAM of this machine.  The machine is a compaq proliant 850 dual pentium pro 200, with 425mb ram and 4 gb scsi hdd.  I have installed freebsd 5.4 pre, m0n0wall, and pfsense.  I have experienced the same problem with each one erasing the NVRAM.  I have also installed debian linux,ipcop, smoothwall which all do not erase nvram.  What happens when it erases the nvram is it causes the second processor to fail.  These compaq servers are setup with a smart start cd which stores all system info in nvram.  You can uses this system to completely wipe everything bios, hdd, nvram.  I have used this cd several times and installed several distro's and the only one that seems to conflict with this machine's nvram is anything based on freebsd.  
>How-To-Repeat:
Just install OS
>Fix:
None that I can find.
>Release-Note:
>Audit-Trail:
>Unformatted: