On 02/16/2012 07:34 PM, Alex Goncharov wrote:
About three years ago, my Compaq Presario F700 notebook got "damaged
in BIOS": it carried Windows Vista then, and that OS could not be
recovered from the system image disks I had created for a brand-new
machine. The damage was somewhere around BIOS/firmware area -- the
way the console looked on a bootup looked differently (simpler) now
that after several reboots trying to recover Vista, it got fried.
Some googling told me then that the irreversible loss of Windows was
not unusual for these Compaq machines -- the damaged systems didn't
give one a chance to use the recovery disks.
OK, I made the system dual bootable to Debian Linux and FreeBSD 8
then; with that, it booted all right, but in both cases the 'nfe0'
interface Ethernet address was being set to 0. No big deal: I used an
Ethernet address from my older laptop destined to be destroyed and
gave it to 'nfe0' when setting the network interface properties at the
system initialization. Works great, both in Debian and FreeBSD.
There was one other odd thing that I noticed then: while Debian booted
without a delay, FreeBSD 8 made a long pause after passing the boot
menu: it would display the '/' character and sit there for some
non-trivial amount of seconds. I assumed that it was doing some BIOS
querying, and with BIOS (firmware?) being damaged, it took the system
some time to figure things out... perhaps it was re-querying BIOS,
seeing the insane value of 0 for an interface's Ethernet address (I
have many machines running FreeBSD, including multiple laptops, and
I get the same on my HP Pavilion dv9750 laptop, but with an intact BIOS,
afaict. And that happens regardless of the wi-fi card's state (eg
disabled or enabled from the hardware button). Maybe this helps.
--
Rares Aioanei
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