# I can't boot the installer on my machine



## slimmons (Nov 27, 2021)

I have a Thinkpad T440p running Coreboot+SeaBIOS. 

I have utterly failed to get the installer to boot on this machine. I have tried dding memstick.img, disc1.iso, and dvd1.iso to a USB stick as well as burning disc1.iso to a DVD-R. I verified the checksums on all downloaded files. I tested all of the media on another machine running the stock Lenovo firmware and all of them work. I also tested the downloaded files in a QEMU virtual machine with SeaBIOS and they work.

On the SeaBIOS machine, it does not even recognize the USB stick at all, and the DVD-R hangs on "Starting the BTX loader". But it has no problem recognizing and booting any Linux distro's installer from the same USB stick.


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## grahamperrin@ (Nov 28, 2021)

For FreeBSD 13.0-RELEASE?

Which installer, exactly?

Can you provide photographs? 

I'm not familiar with T440p and so on. Linking to a hardware probe of a comparable computer might help; see <https://bsd-hardware.info/?view=computers&vendor=Lenovo&model=ThinkPad+T440p+(All)>.


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## Vull (Nov 28, 2021)

Are you using FreeBSD-13.0-RELEASE-amd64-memstick.img?

FreeBSD-13.0-RELEASE-i386-memstick.img is for 32 bit processors only and won't work on your 64-bit laptop.



			https://psref.lenovo.com/syspool/Sys/PDF/withdrawnbook/ThinkPad_T440p.pdf


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## SirDice (Nov 29, 2021)

Vull said:


> FreeBSD-13.0-RELEASE-i386-memstick.img is for 32 bit processors only and won't work on your 64-bit laptop.


The i386 version will work just fine on a modern Intel 64 CPU. That's the whole point of those 64 bit _extensions_. It's not the ideal version to run, I can agree on that, but it'll work just fine.

A CPU that supports Intel 64 (on Intel) or AMD64 (on AMD) is backwards compatible with i386. Intel's other 64 bit platform, IA-64 (Itanium), is NOT backwards compatible with IA-32 (i386). But this isn't an Itanium system.


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## Vull (Nov 29, 2021)

SirDice said:


> The i386 version will work just fine on a modern Intel 64 CPU. That's the whole point of those 64 bit _extensions_. It's not the ideal version to run, I can agree on that, but it'll work just fine.
> 
> A CPU that supports Intel 64 (on Intel) or AMD64 (on AMD) is backwards compatible with i386. Intel's other 64 bit platform, IA-64 (Itanium), is NOT backwards compatible with IA-32 (i386). But this isn't an Itanium system.


Good info. Just trying to figure it out; seems like OP has covered all the other bases I could think of. I remember having trouble booting an amd64 installer on an i386 machine, but probably never tried it going in the other direction.


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## SirDice (Nov 29, 2021)

Vull said:


> I remember having trouble booting an amd64 installer on an i386 machine


That definitely doesn't work, that's correct. But you should be able to run i386 code on a Intel 64 (AMD64) CPU. You still have all the limitations of i386 though, like the 4GB limit (without PAE).


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