Acer Travelmate 8371 bricked by installing FreeBSD?

[Markus Hoenicka]

Hi all,

feel free to consider me paranoid, but have laptop manufacturers  
managed to make their hardware depend on Windoze to boot at all?

Full story: I purchased an Acer Travelmate 8371 and an external USB  
DVD burner as the 8371 does not have an optical drive. I started the  
box, and Windows asked me to finish the installation. Needless to say  
that I refused. I turned off the box, plugged in the DVD drive, and  
fiddled with the BIOS to allow me to boot from the DVD drive. In went  
a Knoppix CD (a live Linux CD) which started up fine. dmesg told me  
that it recognized all essential components of the laptop. Next I put  
in the FreeBSD 8.1 netinstall CD and rebooted. The installation of the  
basics went fine and showed no problems. I was bold enough to use the  
entire hard drive as the FreeBSD slice. This may be important as this  
may have removed any magic that Acer had put onto this drive (there  
were a bunch of partitions and non-assigned areas, only two of them  
NTFS partitions). In any case, when I attempted to reboot into the  
installed FreeBSD, the box no longer made it past the initial Acer  
splash screen. Neither F2 (edit BIOS settings) nor F12 (boot device  
menu) are responsive, only Ctl+Alt+Del and the power switch do have  
any effect.

This left me with a brick, as none of the remedies that Google  
suggested (things like take out battery, unplug power cord, press  
mains switch for 30 sec, reattach power cord and boot) would get this  
box past the initial splash screen.

Did anyone run into similar problems before? Is there any possibility  
that the box was indeed bricked by installing FreeBSD, or did I  
experience a bad hair day?

any help is appreciated
Markus

-- 
Markus Hoenicka
http://www.mhoenicka.de
AQ score 38