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:
> Quoting John Nielsen <lists_at_jnielsen.net>:
> > 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.
>
> Hi John,
>
> Thanks for the report.  As they say missery loves company;)  Somehow
> it would seem that we chose the wrong cpu if practically nothing will
> boot it except windows.  I'm stuck with vista that I've found much
> worse than XP, for a while too I guess.
>
> I'm still in hopes that someone has a trick up their sleeve.  There
> seem to be a lot of laptops that use the Turion 64x2 mobile.

I don't think the problem is with the CPU per se. It seems to be something 
to do with ACPI and/or PCI resource allocation or scanning on this 
particular chipset (or other hardware combinations)..

JN