POS system trashing hard drives during install

[John McDonnell]

I had a thought and realized that the hard drives I had tried using on the POS all were drives from Windows machines, and maybe one that was blank, and the POS had no trouble POSTing with those drives. It wasn't until after rebooting with FreeBSD installed on the drive that the machine will no longer POST. So, there couldn't be something specific to the drive in the system itself as it has no trouble with other drives until FreeBSD is actually installed.

I took this to mean that there shouldn't be something specific on the drive to prevent it from POSTing. For a test, I have a network bootable copy of Xubuntu 12.0 sitting on my PXE server that I just installed to the POS system. It made it through POST and booted from the drive with no problem. So, I really don't think it is something to do with dpecial information stored to the drive itself. About the only other thing I can think of trying in order to get FBSD working on the POS is doing an old "dangerously dedicated" mode install and see if the machine likes that better. But I think I need to find an older install disk somewhere for that, or find instructions online somewhere on how to do it manually. I've never had an issue where I felt the need to try that style of install.

If nothing else, I should at least be able to get a version of Linux running on the machine, which will be an improvement over XP, but not as nice as running FreeBSD. (Though if I can't get the touchscreen running, it'll be back to XP. I'm betting it is fairly simple to get done, I was just surprised it didn't work out of the box since I believe it's an old serial connected touchscreen. I'll look into it after I exhaust my options of getting FreeBSD installed.)

-- 
John McDonnell
Penn Cambria School District
mcdonnjd at pcam.org