compaq 6515b turion x2 laptop

[Coleman Kane]

On Sat, 2008-05-10 at 11:15 -0500, rar102 at ra.msstate.edu wrote:
> I recently bought a new laptop.  I have been unsuccesful in installing FreeBSD
> (or any alternatives for that matter) onto it.  I wonder if I can get some
> help.  I have tried to:
> 
> 1.  install the FreeBSD amd64 7.0 release.  Stopped at a "No disks found!"
> prompt.  With a little bit googling, I see that FreeBSD has been successfully
> installed onto ST9120822AS hard drive.
> 
> 2.  run the latest Knoppix on it (just to see if the Debian i386 Linux flavors
> can do it).  Hangs on detecting hard drive.  To be honest, I want BSD if I can
> use it, anyway.
> 
> 3.  install the FreeBSD 7-stable amd64 April snapshot.  Same result as #1.
> 
> 4.  install NetBSD amd 4.0-release.  Gives a disk geometry warning but installs
> without much further ado.  In fact, I am still using NetBSD's bootloader.  It
> boots both Vista and NetBSD.  But...  when I boot into NetBSD, it overheats,
> panics and dies within a minute.  Trolling the internet again, I see that I am
> not the only one that has run into this problem.  It is not running long enough
> to try an ftp install.  I would like to not burn up this motherboard and I
> don't see any NetBSD snapshot iso's to see if they have resolved this problem.
> 
> 5.  install the FreeBSD i386 7.0 release.  Installer complains about disk
> geometry.  At the partitioning screen I press 'g' ('Set Disk Geometry').  I
> previously used Vista's magic partition resizer to leave me some space.  I tell
> the sysintall to format that empty space as ufs2 and press 'q' ('Quit' out the
> disk partitioning step of sysintall).  At this point, it pops up a message that
> my partitions are not starting on disk boundaries.  I aborted the install at
> that point.  It may still work.  I just don't know.  I would rather
> 
> 6.  install the FreeBSD i386 7-stable April snapshot.  Same result as #1 and #3.
>  This was kind of strange.  I would have expected the same result as #5.
> 
> Any suggestions???
> 
> RAR
> 

RAR,

You are in luck! Well, actually I have good news and I have bad news.
The good news is that I have nearly the same (6715b) laptop and
experienced similar problems when getting FreeBSD onto it. After some
work, I've been able to use FreeBSD reliably on the system.

The bad news is that you probably have an overlap of PCI memory ranges
between the SATA controller and another device in the system (likely the
audio controller).

I put up a page describing the problem here:
http://www.cokane.org/dokuwiki/freebsd/amd64_compatibility#getting_the_hp_compaq_6715b_working

Specifically, read this section:
http://www.cokane.org/dokuwiki/freebsd/amd64_compatibility#the_onboard_ati_sb600_hda_audio_controller

Give me the weekend, and I will post a 7.0-RELEASE CD with the patch in
it. I figured that I should have done it a while ago. Oh well.

While you are at it, see if you can use Scroll-Lock and the up/down keys
to read the kernel messages. See if you can find the atapci0 probe line
for your SATA controller (AHCI), as well as the line for your pcm0
device and send them back to me. I can add your info to my webpage to
help others.

It will look like this:
atapci0: <ATI IXP600 SATA300 controller> port 0x9000-0x9007,0x9008-0x900b,0x9010-0x9017,0x5018-0x501b,0x5020-0x502f mem 0xd0609000-0xd06093ff irq 16 at device 18.0 on pci0
...
pcm0: <ATI SB600 High Definition Audio Controller> mem 0xd0608000-0xd060bfff irq 16 at device 20.2 on pci0

You'll notice the "mem" resource for the audio controller is
0xd0608000-0xd060bff, and the "mem" resource for the SATA controller is
0xd0609000-0xd06093ff. The SATA controller's "mem" resource is
completely covered by this audio controller.

If you happen to have access to another machine for building your own
releases, you can try my patch and build them from it.

-- 
Coleman Kane
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