Re: Can't install FreeBSD Current or 7.0 on AMD Turion 64x2 Mobile TL-58 1.9 Ghz in an Acer 5520-5679

On Friday 21 December 2007, eculp wrote:
> We have an almost new Acer 5520-5679 in the office that we intended to
> partition and  install 8.0-CURRENT-200712-amd64 but much to my
> surprise accessing the cdrom it went into an immediate, unreadable
> loop of hex numbers that can only be stoped by powering down.  I next
> tried 7.0BETA-4 standard (no amd64) and I can get to the Welcome menu
> but with all options end up with a BTX halted, almost immediately.
>
> The machine specs are:
> AMD Turion 64x2 Mobile TL-58 1.9 Ghz 2x512K Lw cache
> 2GB DDR2
> 160G HDD
>
> Short update.  I built a release locally with yesterdays sources
> 7.0-BETA4 with the same problem.
>
> Has anyone else seen this with Turion 64x2 or is it an Acer thing.  We
> should learn that cheap is often expensive.

I just tried an amd64 7.0-BETA4 rescue filesystem CD on the same type of 
machine and saw the same loop of hex, etc. An i386 6.2-RELEASE CD similarly 
gives a BTX halted message, with or without ACPI or safe mode, etc. If I 
had to guess I would say it's the same messages in both cases (register 
dumps and so forth), but for some reason it loops on the amd64 boot.

I saw somewhat similar freezes wtih various Linux boot CD's. In two cases 
(Kubuntu 7.04 and a BackTrack beta from today) doing a momentary press of 
the power button would actually allow the boot to continue briefly but then 
they would freeze again before getting anywhere useful. I was able to boot 
successfully using systemrescuecd-x86-0.4.3-beta4.iso. It probably has the 
newest Linux kernel of the lot I tried. I'm not sure if it does anything 
special in the initrd, etc., but it did come up and recognize the disks and 
the Ethernet, which is usually what I need in a recovery CD.

I'll be leaving Windows Vista on this particular laptop for now, I just 
wanted to explore the disk layout and recovery partition before I did 
anything else (including accept the Windows Terms, etc) in case I ended up 
wanting to try a _different_ version of Windows on the thing.

JN