Acer Travelmate 8371 bricked by installing FreeBSD?

[Andriy Gapon]

on 11/11/2010 17:11 Warren Block said the following:
> On Thu, 11 Nov 2010, Markus Hoenicka wrote:
> 
>> components of the laptop. Next I put in the FreeBSD 8.1 netinstall CD and
>> rebooted. The installation of the basics went fine and showed no problems. I was
>> bold enough to use the entire hard drive as the FreeBSD slice. This may be
>> important as this may have removed any magic that Acer had put onto this drive
>> (there were a bunch of partitions and non-assigned areas, only two of them NTFS
>> partitions).
> 
> Can't recall whether it was a netbook or mid-size Extensa, but at least one Acer
> I've used with FreeBSD had a first partition that was required for the BIOS. 
> Don't know if it was loading the entire BIOS from the disk like Compaq in the old
> days, or whether it's just some other data.

Interesting idea - perhaps in this case it's AHCI BIOS "driver" that was stored on
one of those partitions.

-- 
Andriy Gapon