Acer Travelmate 8371 bricked by installing FreeBSD?

[Warren Block]

On Thu, 11 Nov 2010, Markus Hoenicka wrote:

> 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).

Can't recall whether it was a netbook or mid-size Extensa, but at least 
one Acer I've used with FreeBSD had a first partition that was required 
for the BIOS.  Don't know if it was loading the entire BIOS from the 
disk like Compaq in the old days, or whether it's just some other data.

The net effect was that wiping out the first partition caused it to stop 
at boot.  It's been long enough now that I can't recall how I restored 
the drive; may have taken it out and connected to another machine.  The 
restore was just an original image of the drive, which I always do (and 
suggest) before allowing the system a first boot.  Clonezilla is great 
for this.

Besides the first partition, there was a restore partition and a working 
partition, both NTFS.