4.9 installation woes (on thinkpad 560X)

[David Gerard]

On 03/17/04 00:09, David Gerard wrote:

> I was advised by a few people (including the laptop's previous owner) that
> FreeBSD 5.x would be quite difficult to get working with sound, and that
> it would be a better idea to try with 4.9.
> I have just spent a few hours carefully reinstalling the laptop with 
> FreeBSD 4.9. Restart for its first boot ... and it won't. It sits there at
>     F1  DOS
>     F2  FreeBSD
>     Default: F2 _
> and seems to consider the keyboard beneath its notice. Odd, since the 
> caps lock light goes on and off as expected. But nothing will get it off 
> this screen.
> The DOS partition is a 20 meg partition for IBM system tools, as yet not 
> installed. It's also before the FreeBSD partition on the disk, if that's
> relevant.


Wiped and tried again. First with the whole disk as a FreeBSD partition, to
see if 4.9 would go on at all (it did). Then with FreeBSD as the *first*
partition, and a DOS partition taking the other half of the disk (my wife
has decided the laptop will be more usable dual-booting into Windows).
Now it's working fine :-)

Still haven't got sound going, but will let the list know when I do!


- d.