HP 8440p Will Not Bot

[Cy Schubert]

Cy Schubert writes:
> Hi everyone,
> 
> A little background before I describe the problem.
> 
> I'm currently looking to replace my Acer 3623NWxMI laptop. It's been a 
> reliable machine running FreeBSD 5.something to -CURRENT. It currently has 
> 8.2 on it with 9.0-CURRENT (not -RC, it's pretty old) and XP on separate 
> partitions/slices, and a spare FreeBSD partition (was 7.4 but currently 
> unused). No problems here. (A 250 GB disk is pretty small when you have 
> four operating systems on it.)
> 
> I've managed to extend the life of this Acer 3623 through numerous disk, 
> memory, and CPU upgrades, and have disassembled it a few times to clean out 
> the heat sink of dust, dog and cat fur. But the old laptop's time has come 
> and it's time to look for a replacement for this six year old laptop. It's 
> getting pretty long in the tooth and I need something that supports VT-x or 
> AMD-V, which the Pentium M does not.
> 
> As I'll be shopping around for a replacement I've cloned my FreeBSD 8.2 
> partitions and whatever I need from my ZFS zpool to an external USB drive. 
> No problems here. I've booted the external drive on my Acer and FreeBSD 
> works fine. I've been doing this for years as it's my DRP (I use the term 
> disaster in the broadest sense) recovery solution, as I have other external 
> USB drives which I've booted my prod server downstairs from to recover the 
> system disk. I've also used this process to upgrade system disks on my 
> laptop and my servers downstairs. The process works and this particular 
> drive boots FreeBSD on my Acer (df -h shows the USB is mounted as root not 
> the internal IDE drive). All is well here.
> 
> I unplug the USB drive and plug it into an HP elitebook 8440p. It's my 
> employer's laptop with Windows 7 Enterprise installed on it. The BIOS is 
> locked down and I don't know the BIOS password. However I can select the 
> option to boot from USB disk, which it does in the broadest sense of the 
> word. The problem is that it loads the FreeBSD MBR on the USB drive. It 
> then loads the FreeBSD stage 2 boot on the USB drive and hangs.
> 
> Act 2: Not to be outsmarted by this HP laptop, I try again. This time when 
> the stage 2 boot loader spinner displays the boot: prompt, I hit space and 
> enter
> 
> 	0:da(0,a)/boot/loader
> 
> This gets me a little further. It now hangs at Loading 
> /boot/defaults/loader.conf.
> 
> It may very well be that there is some kind of BIOS setting that might fix 
> this but since it's not my laptop and since the BIOS is locked down I have 
> no way to resolve this issue, or it may be that the HP elitebook 8440p just 
> doesn't work with FreeBSD. Or, there may be something I could do to in my 
> loader.conf that might bypass this problem.
> 
> Any ideas?
> 
> If I can get it to work and test out FreeBSD 8.2 on this laptop I'll 
> consider buying one to replace my Acer.
> 
> In the mean time I'll try to boot this USB drive on an Acer 5560G (the 
> label says 5560-sb410) with a four core AMD A6-3400 processor (1.4-2.3 
> GHz), 6 GB of DDR3, 640 GB drive, etc., at a store I walked into yesterday. 
>  The $499 price tag caught my eye. Maybe I'll have better luck there.
> 
> Any and all help would be appreciated.

Excuse my replying to myself.

I managed to get FreeBSD to boot on the HP.

	0:ad(0,a)/boot/kernel/kernel did the trick.

I think with access to the BIOS I should be able to change a setting, maybe 
the SATA setting to IDE instead of AHCI and loader should boot.

It sees the NIC and wireless NIC.

X has a problem with the display. I think this would be a minor problem.

I also tried FreeBSD out on a number of Acer laptops, including the 5560G 
and a 5745. It didn't see the Acer wireless NIC. I hear it's a newer 
Atheros chipset. This is more of a problem than what I see with the HP. I 
recall reading somewhere that somebody managed to get wifi working on an 
Acer Nplify card.

I'm in the process of migrating to 9.0, so I'll give that a try on the USB 
drive.


-- 
Cheers,
Cy Schubert <Cy.Schubert at komquats.com>
FreeBSD UNIX:  <cy at FreeBSD.org>   Web:  http://www.FreeBSD.org

	The need of the many outweighs the greed of the few.