Acer Travelmate 8371 bricked by installing FreeBSD?

[Uffe Jakobsen]

Hi Marcus,

On 11/11/10 13.21, Markus Hoenicka wrote:
> 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).

I've had similar considerations - but later it was revealed that it was 
of no relevance for the problem...

> 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.
>

likewise here - the system appeared to hang in the bios...

 >
> 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?
>

As we've discussed before I'm using an Acer Aspire 1410 (11.6") with 
FreeBSD 8.1. During initial installation I've expierienced something 
similar with my Acer system...

My guess is that if you remove/unplug your HDD - it will not hang anymore...

The workaround for me was to remove the disk - go into the bios - and 
configure the sata emulation from ahci mode to ide "legacy/compatible" 
mode - or whatever they called it in the bios (I've no access to the 
notebook right now)

After that you can put back the HDD and boot again - and it should work.

I'd almost forgot about this problem since it is 6 months ago.

My suspicion at that time was around the FBSD BootManager that I have 
installed - but I never got around to isolate (and report) the problem...

Question: did you install the FBSD BootManager or just a std MBR ?

I hope it helps.

Kind regards Uffe Jakobsen :-)