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

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "eculp" <eculp_at_encontacto.net>
To: "John Nielsen" <lists_at_jnielsen.net>
Cc: <freebsd-current_at_freebsd.org>
Sent: Friday, December 21, 2007 5:52 PM
Subject: Re: Can't install FreeBSD Current or 7.0 on AMD Turion 64x2 
MobileTL-58 1.9 Ghz in an Acer 5520-5679


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.

Thanks again,

ed
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The trick is to start pressing <spacebar> when the BIOS splash appears. 
This should bring you the the boot slice prompt, where you just press 
<enter> and the boot continues normally.  Without this trick, my HP Pavilion 
dv9420us (also a Turion machine) gives identical symptoms to yours.

jmc