Re: Installing on IBM Z61t


Problem solved - partly anyway.
It is apparently a marginal CD burn.

You can go to bootdisk.org or freedos.org and download an iso image to make
a bootable CD. I think you need to first get your system actually booting
a CD of any OS, then move on to installing FreeBSD.

OK. I scrounged up another boot CD I had around.
It booted OK. So, I checked this CD some more. It booted on
some machines and not on others.

I had the person in the next office burn the same file and
it works on the IBM notebook.

It may be your BIOS isn't booting the CD or you simply have a CD with a bad
boot image. So getting a CD that does indeed boot is the first step.

Being able to read a CD is not sufficient. Bootable CD's have a strict
format that must be in place or the boot fails.

What was throwing me off was that I had tried it on a couple of machines
with no problem, but then I hit the notebook machine and it failed.
Then, when I was checking further, it failed on another machine that
already had FreeBSD installed - using a different CD. So, I got someone
to burn one on a different machine and it works.

I wonder, though if there is something different with how burncd works
in FreeBSD 6.0 or 6.1. First of all, the device name I had to use
used to be acd0c and now that isn't there and I tried to use acd0 -
without the 'c'. It seemed to try and burn, but always failed in
the fixate step. Previously I was using FreeBSD 4.9 and this is
the first time I have tried it in 6.1 and then got the same failure
on another machine in 6.0.

So, might I be missing something?

I have done lots of burns (successfully) on the one on the 6.1 machine
so am not totally surprised that it may have died.

But, I hardly expect that that other machine running 6.0 would have
worn out the burner because I probably haven't done more than one or
two burns on it since getting it.

By the way, none of this explains why I was unable to boot from the
boot floppy installation set. It just kept scrolling up junk on
the screen. It worked fine on all the desk machines I have handy,
but not the notebook machine.

////jerry


-Derek

At 08:14 PM 8/21/2006, Jerry McAllister wrote:

I would check that you have the IDE interface enabled that the CD plugs
into. Have you tried booting other bootable CD's like a WinXP CD just to
see if you get it to boot from CD.

I don't happen to have any other bootable CDs handy.
But, I was able to read CDs on that drive in XP.
They were just videos, etc.
They were not bootable, though, so I didn't attempt to boot with them.

////jerry


-Derek

At 05:20 PM 8/21/2006, Jerry McAllister wrote:
Hi All,

I am trying to set up a notebook computer for someone (I only have
towers and rackmount servers running FreeBSD myself).

The machine is an IBM Z61t Lenova with 2 GHz Intel CPU, 1 GB memory
The BIOS version is 1.06 (7FET46WW) of 2006-04-27

I has an: ATAPI CD0:MATSHITADVD-RAM UK-842-(PM) cd/dvd reader/burner.

I got a USB floppy and put it on too.

The boot order in BIOS is currently CD, Floppy Hard disk

I have switched floppy and CD a couple of times and removed
a number of other thing from the boot order - mostly things
that are not actually on the machine.

I was able to boot Partition Magic with the USB floppy and fix up
the hard disk to make room. I added a FAT32 (#3) slice and an
undesignated slice (#4). I hoped to add FreeBSD to the undesignated
slice and use the FAT32 for communication between WinXP and FreeBSD
since the XP slice was NTFS.

But, it will not boot the FreeBSD 6.1 installation CD - it completely
ignores it and boots WinXP, even though it looks like it is enabled
in the BIOS. It doesn't even seem to try booting the CD and fail.
The BIOS doesn't appear to talk to it at all.

That CD worked fine in another (deskside) machine - a Dell, by
the way. I had no trouble doing an install with it on that machine.

So, I made a set of 6.1 install floppies.
Although the Partition Magic (several years old copy) floppies booted
just fine, when I started to boot from the boot.flp floppy it read it
and then started repeatedly dumping some message on the screen. It
just kept scrolling up too fast to read. It looked like it might
be 5 or 6 lines long.

Just in case it was telling me to put in the kern1.flp, I did that
and hit enter, but it did not stop scrolling what appeared to be
the same message, nor did it appear to read that floppy at all.

I have rummaged through the BIOS setup and not found anything that
jumps out at me that I should turn on or off. I did not find
anything that looked like 'plug n play'.

So, my obvious question is: (questions are:)
Is there any hope of installing FreeBSD on this notebook computer?
Is there something I can turn on or off to make it work?
Why will the old Partition Magic floppy work, but the new FreeBSD 6.1 not?
Why doesn't the BIOS even attempt to check the CD for a boot sector,
but just ignore it completely and boot the HD?

Thanks for any clues or solid informatino,

////jerry

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