8 to 9: A longer wait early in the boot of a (damaged) Compaq Presario

[Alex Goncharov]

,--- I/Alex (Thu, 16 Feb 2012 12:34:36 -0500) ----*
| There was one other odd thing that I noticed then: while Debian booted
| without a delay, FreeBSD 8 made a long pause after passing the boot
| menu: it would display the '/' character and sit there for some
| non-trivial amount of seconds.  I assumed that it was doing some BIOS
| querying, and with BIOS (firmware?) being damaged, it took the system
| some time to figure things out... perhaps it was re-querying BIOS,
| seeing the insane value of 0 for an interface's Ethernet address (I
| have many machines running FreeBSD, including multiple laptops, and
| this machine is unique in the long bootup pause).
`-------------------------------------------------*
,--- Rares Aioanei (Thu, 16 Feb 2012 20:08:14 +0200) ----*
| I get the same on my HP Pavilion dv9750 laptop, but with an intact BIOS, 
| afaict. And that happens regardless of the wi-fi card's state (eg 
| disabled or enabled from the hardware button). Maybe this helps.
`--------------------------------------------------------*

To add to the fact base: I don't have any of this with my HP Pavilion
DV6-1334US: neither with FreeBSD 8 nor 9 (upgraded that laptop two
days ago, too.)

-- Alex -- alex-goncharov at comcast.net --