Installing FreeBSD 7.1 on Presario v2000 laptop

[Walt Roberts]

I have this system running 7.0-RELEASE.  

Here is the problem.  When freebsd boots it does a device probe looking for 
serial and parallel io ports.  These ports do not exist on the V2000 
notebooks.  They have been removed and replaced with USB and Firewire ports.

When FreeBSD is booting it probes for these devices and subsequently hangs 
when they don't answer.  I'm not an internals guy, so I don't know exactly 
where it hangs, and much as I wish I had time to dig through the code, I 
don't.  

There is an easy and straightforward work around.

Boot into the boot loader.  When the bootmenu comes up select the loader menu.  
I think this is number 6.  You will get an OK prompt.

At this point you can disable the device probes for the paralle port and the 
serial ports.  Type SHOW to list the parameters.

Then at the OK disable the probes by SET   as follows:

OK  set hint.sio.0.disabled 1
OK  set hint.sio.1.disabled 1
OK  set hint.sio.2.disabled 1
OK  set hint.sio.3.disabled 1

This will disable the probes for those devices.  I also disable the parallel 
port for this notebook.  

OK  set hint.ppc.0.disabled 1
OK

At this point you can now boot the system with the boot command:

OK boot

The system should boot normally from this point on.  Once you get an operating 
system, go to /boot/device.hints and place these flags in the device.hints 
file.  The system should read this file and boot without using the boot 
loader.

By the way, I have been using this system for about 4 years with FreeBSD and 
KDE with a split disk for those few commercial programs I must use with the 
Redmond OS.  It has been a tremendous workhorse around the world.

I never had to do this with the i386 incarnation, only the AMD64.  

A second problem is the ndis driver for the wireless card.  You can't just 
build a new ndis driver around the Broadcom drivers.  The original BCWL5.sys 
and .inf don't work on AMD64 builds.  You must use the 64 bit versions of 
these.  I think they started making them with VISTA, but I'm not sure.  I 
somehow found a the BCMWL564.sys somewhere and rebuilt the ndis wrapper and 
it works fine.  If you need more information on where I got the driver, I'll 
see if I can remember where it came from.  

Again, this was not a problem with the i368 kernel, only the AMD64.  On the 
plus side, I think the system runs much better with the AMD64 kernel than the 
i368 kernel. 

 
On Tuesday 06 January 2009 07:17:08 pm Raúl Oyanedel Westermeyer wrote:
> Hi.
>
> I've join this mailing list to obtain some help for installing FreeBSD on
> my laptop, a Compaq Presario V2000 series, model v2615LA. I have the
> FreeBSD 7.1-RELEASE DVD and I boot it without problem. However, when I try
> to install it, it halts on "Timecounters tick every 1.000 msec", and de
> CD/DVD drive stop to read the disc. I've tried with acpi disable option,
> and safe mode too, with the same result. I´ve also tried to manually
> disable acpi, with 'unset acpi_load' in the promt, but nothing.
>
> Any idea?
>
> I've added a hardware list on a text file attached to this mail for more
> info.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Raúl.
>
>
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-- 
Walter A. Roberts, MD
Karmanos Cancer Institute
Gershinson Radiation Oncology Center
3990 John R
Detroit Michigan 48201