Did somebody boot old Sony Vaio laptop from FreeBSD memstick successfully?

[Julian H. Stacey]

Bap wrote:
> Quoting Lev Serebryakov <lev at FreeBSD.org>:
> > Hello, All.
> >
> >  I'm trying to install FreeBSD 10-R (i386) on old Sony Vaio laptop (it is
> > VGN-SZ340P, Merom generation of Core2, ~2007).
> >
> >  It allows to select "USB Hard drive" or "USB Optical Drive" as boot device,
> > but it writes "No operating system" in both cases.
> >
> >   I've checked memstick and found, that it doesn't have MBR (it looks like
> > /dev/da4a). I've added MBR, one slice, mbr bootcode, make this slice
> > active, and dump memstick image to /dev/da4s1. My desktop boots from this
> > memstick without problems, laptop says "No boot code".
> >
> >  Unfortunately, this Laptop has broken CD-ROM (and it looks like by DVD-RW
> > drive in desktop is disgunctional too, I've tried to do something with it 4
> > years ago).
> >
> >  Maybe, somebody has experience of booting such old Sony Vaio from FreeBSD
> > memstick and here is some trick to do this?
> 
> Not sure about a Vaio, but I have many machines that will not boot  
> from larger memory sticks.
> 
> Creating a 1G partion on a big stick and dd-ing onto that works for  
> those machines.

Ah, glad you mentioned that,
	(as I too have made large bootable FS's on USB, but only
	 tested on amd64 so far & had forgotten i386 limits)

Some non PCs also dont want more than 2G SDRAM,
eg SDRAM player car radio transmitter 
	http://www.berklix.com/~jhs/txt/renkforce-fm-16.html
it plays from 2G SDRAM with an MBR & FAT, but the manual says <= 2G.

I suppose 32 bit CPUs will freak at/above 4G = 4,294,967,296
& what with cavalier mixing on int / unsigned, above 2G may be tempring fate.

http://www.cnet.com/laptops/sony-vaio-vgn-sz340/4505-3121_7-32328541.html
	 Intel Core 2 Duo T7200 / 2.0 GHz

http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/search.html?keyword=T7200
http://ark.intel.com/products/27255/Intel-Core2-Duo-Processor-T7200-4M-Cache-2_00-GHz-667-MHz-FSB?wapkw=t7200
	Instruction Set 	64-bit

Hmm, so that's not the reason Lev is hanging then.

Cheers,
Julian
-- 
Julian Stacey, BSD Unix Linux C Sys Eng Consultant, Munich http://berklix.com
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