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BSD Still Won't Run on IBM ThinkPads?

Posted by Cliff on from the fixing-the-problem dept.

omega_cubed asks: "'You've successfully installed FreeBSD, now your computer is going to hang at boot up!' -- That was what I just recently suffered. I've been running Mandrake on my ThinkPad X20 for almost a year. But the lack of high speed internet connection over the summer prevented me from keeping up with the various patches/updates. Many services--sendmail, apache, etc.--were shutdown one by one because of security vulnerabilities. Recently I decided that instead of trying to catch all those patches I missed in the last few months, I might just as well do a clean install of FreeBSD. I've done what I think was all the preparations necessary: I backed-up all my files, checked all the hardwares for possible conflicts (on FreeBSD.org) and supports, downloaded the ISO image. And I decided the computer should be able to take it. Unfortunately, I didn't come across the old slashdot article reporting a possible conflict between IBM ThinkPad's BIOS and FreeBSD's filesystem. So last night, after much struggling, I installed FreeBSD. It finished, rebooted, and the computer now just hangs at bootup (here's a more detailed report on what happened). It doesn't even go into BIOS. Does anyone have experience dealing with this? Is there anyway I can update the BIOS? The diskettes provided IBM were not able to boot the computer, and I am at a loss here. Thanks."

2 of 54 comments (clear)

  1. Google is your friend by XBL · · Score: 5, Informative

    The answer is here.

    You might want to remove the hard drive, and see what happens when you boot it without a hard drive in. Maybe this will give you some sort of clue on what is wrong with it.

    If your absolutely have to, buy a 2.5" hard drive adapter for your desktop machine. You can then format the laptop hard drive from that.

  2. Re:Nothing to do with the OS by joshuac · · Score: 5, Informative

    ---snip
    Not being able to get into the BIOS or updating the BIOS has nothing to do with the OS installed.
    ---snip

    Actually, in this case it does. The BIOS in many modern laptops (and in some desktops) has a built in suspend-to-disk routine. When being powered up, they check the harddrive for the image they saved last time they shutdown. The FreeBSD partition happens to look like a suspend image to the ThinkPad BIOS.