BSD installation gone wrong- can't boot or access BIOS

[Lisa_T]

I have a X20 (2662 36G) and have been experimenting with dual booting Win 2000Pro and a variety of open source distros, with mixed success. I was juat about to give up when I cam across DesktopBSD which sounded good, and the X20 was listed as a laptop that had sucessfully installed the OS.. so I went ahead.

Installation went fine. Rebooted. The Thinkpad screen with the Bios shortcuts etc comes up, then flashes black as if the computer is trying to boot- and then onto a screen with just the Thinkpad logo. This carries on repeatedly as the computer tries to boot. Live cds, rescue cds and recovery cds have all encountered the same problem as trying to boot from the HDD. Despite trying F8 and F1 and anything else I casn think of, I have been unable to enter bios or any other recovery/setup app.

Further research revealed that this is an issue with the X20 and BSD unless the newer BIOS has been installed. Needless to add, I didn't know that, and I'm left with a comptuer that refuses to boot. The only saving grace is the fact that the X20 is not my main computer, but as it's so portable I like using it for work.

Has anyone encountered this problem? Is it possible to restore the bios or do I need to get the HDD reformatted/ repaired?

Please help!

[egibbs]

Can you pull the HDD and boot from a floppy? If so download the latest BIOS FDD version and try updating like that.

Ed Gibbs

[Lisa_T]

I could try- what do you mean by 'pull the HDD'- remove it?

[egibbs]

Yep - yank it out. Not sure about the Xes, but on the T-Series it takes aout 30 seconds (or 5 if like me you lost the screw). Of course it needs to be off when you do that. Check the Hardware Maintenance Manual for instructions.

Ed Gibbs

[Lisa_T]

er, ok. I'm confident about software normally, but hardware is another matter. So I should:

-download and save to disk the bios update- I take it I need to actually install the file onto a FDD?
-turn the X20 off, unplug everything
-remove HDD
-plug X20 in again, and try booting from floppy
-run prog to install new BIOS
-turn laptop off again and replace HDD.

Just to clarify: how does the BIOS and HDD interact? They're obviously independent of each other or this trick would have no hope of working. If the BIOS is hopelessly broken/ corrupted does that mean my HDD is probably fine? Can the BIOS be replaced if that's the case- I'm assuming the actual BIOS is on a piece of hardware?

Thanks for helping! only problem is that when I check the IBM site, they say that I can't update the BIOS without also updating some embeddeding thing orother- which you need to do from windows- but I can't get any os to run as things are!

[egibbs]

Your sequence is correct. Yu'll of course need to use another machine to download the BIOS update program to floppy, since yours is currently toasted.

BIOS resides in a chip on the motherboard. If the BIOS is really hosed you are either looking at a new motherboard, or unsoldering and replacing the chip (if you can find one with a good BIOS loaded in it).

BIOS loads first, then sends the machine off to the HDD to find the boot sector to start loading the software. My hope is your BIOS is not really corrupted (that is usually pretty hard to do), but rather will just not play nice with the boot sector that BSD wrote to your drive. So if you pull the drive, the BIOS may be happy enough to let you load the new version.

Updating the BIOS should get you to the point where you can at least boot from HDD, and then update the embedded controller first thing.

If that doesn't work, I'm afraid it's time to hit ebay looking for a compatible Motherboard.

Good Luck,

Ed Gibbs

[Lisa_T]

To be honest if it gets to that point i may not bother- the laptop only cost me £150 in the first place; if the expense of repairing it gets beyond the £100 mark I'd probably just cut my losses and learn the moral!

Do I need a specific kind of screwdriver? I checked the bottom of the ibm and the screwdrivers i have, and they were all too large.

ETA: This sounds like a fix for my problem:

3.10. My A, T, or X series IBM Thinkpad locks up when I first booted up my FreeBSD installation. How can I solve this?

A bug in early revisions of IBM's BIOS on these machines mistakenly identifies the FreeBSD partition as a potential FAT suspend-to-disk partition. When the BIOS tries to parse the FreeBSD partition it hangs.

It has been reported that later IBM BIOS revisions may have reintroduced the bug. This message from Jacques Vidrine to the FreeBSD laptop computer mailing list describes a procedure which may work if your newer IBM laptop does not boot FreeBSD properly, and you can upgrade or downgrade the BIOS.

If you have an earlier BIOS, and upgrading is not an option, a workaround is to install FreeBSD, change the partition ID FreeBSD uses, and install new boot blocks that can handle the different partition ID.

First, you will need to restore the machine to a state where it can get through its self-test screen. Doing this requires powering up the machine without letting it find a FreeBSD partition on its primary disk. One way is to remove the hard disk and temporarily move it to an older ThinkPad (such as a ThinkPad 600) or a desktop PC with an appropriate conversion cable. Once it is there, you can delete the FreeBSD partition and move the hard disk back. The ThinkPad should now be in a bootable state again.

What conversion cables do I need?

[kodell]

Conversion cables: you can buy an adapter for a 2.5" drive to a 3.5" drive & put the laptop drive in a desktop PC. I've gotten these for $3-$6. (most of the time laptop drives don't ship with the master/slave jumper so you'll be forced to have it as the master on the second IDE)

It's easier to get a USB enclosure that will hold a 2.5" notebook drive - saves opening up and messing with a deskop PC. I paid around $20 US for the one I use - it's pretty handy to have anyway.