HP 8440p Will Not Bot

[Cy Schubert]

Hi everyone,

A little background before I describe the problem.

I'm currently looking to replace my Acer 3623NWxMI laptop. It's been a 
reliable machine running FreeBSD 5.something to -CURRENT. It currently has 
8.2 on it with 9.0-CURRENT (not -RC, it's pretty old) and XP on separate 
partitions/slices, and a spare FreeBSD partition (was 7.4 but currently 
unused). No problems here. (A 250 GB disk is pretty small when you have 
four operating systems on it.)

I've managed to extend the life of this Acer 3623 through numerous disk, 
memory, and CPU upgrades, and have disassembled it a few times to clean out 
the heat sink of dust, dog and cat fur. But the old laptop's time has come 
and it's time to look for a replacement for this six year old laptop. It's 
getting pretty long in the tooth and I need something that supports VT-x or 
AMD-V, which the Pentium M does not.

As I'll be shopping around for a replacement I've cloned my FreeBSD 8.2 
partitions and whatever I need from my ZFS zpool to an external USB drive. 
No problems here. I've booted the external drive on my Acer and FreeBSD 
works fine. I've been doing this for years as it's my DRP (I use the term 
disaster in the broadest sense) recovery solution, as I have other external 
USB drives which I've booted my prod server downstairs from to recover the 
system disk. I've also used this process to upgrade system disks on my 
laptop and my servers downstairs. The process works and this particular 
drive boots FreeBSD on my Acer (df -h shows the USB is mounted as root not 
the internal IDE drive). All is well here.

I unplug the USB drive and plug it into an HP elitebook 8440p. It's my 
employer's laptop with Windows 7 Enterprise installed on it. The BIOS is 
locked down and I don't know the BIOS password. However I can select the 
option to boot from USB disk, which it does in the broadest sense of the 
word. The problem is that it loads the FreeBSD MBR on the USB drive. It 
then loads the FreeBSD stage 2 boot on the USB drive and hangs.

Act 2: Not to be outsmarted by this HP laptop, I try again. This time when 
the stage 2 boot loader spinner displays the boot: prompt, I hit space and 
enter

	0:da(0,a)/boot/loader

This gets me a little further. It now hangs at Loading 
/boot/defaults/loader.conf.

It may very well be that there is some kind of BIOS setting that might fix 
this but since it's not my laptop and since the BIOS is locked down I have 
no way to resolve this issue, or it may be that the HP elitebook 8440p just 
doesn't work with FreeBSD. Or, there may be something I could do to in my 
loader.conf that might bypass this problem.

Any ideas?

If I can get it to work and test out FreeBSD 8.2 on this laptop I'll 
consider buying one to replace my Acer.

In the mean time I'll try to boot this USB drive on an Acer 5560G (the 
label says 5560-sb410) with a four core AMD A6-3400 processor (1.4-2.3 
GHz), 6 GB of DDR3, 640 GB drive, etc., at a store I walked into yesterday. 
 The $499 price tag caught my eye. Maybe I'll have better luck there.

Any and all help would be appreciated.


-- 
Cheers,
Cy Schubert <Cy.Schubert at komquats.com>
FreeBSD UNIX:  <cy at FreeBSD.org>   Web:  http://www.FreeBSD.org

	The need of the many outweighs the greed of the few.