# Unable to boot as FreeBSD 12.2 ( i386) bricked my laptop



## markmarques (Dec 14, 2020)

This weekend in my BSD experiences I tried to install FreeBSD 12.2 into an old unbranded 2003 Intel Centrino M laptop 512Mb RAM but it did not go well ...
( I know beforehand that it might be needed the I386 iso and selected all the default installation choices )
The Laptop previously had installed Ubuntu , Windows , AntiX ...
The laptop BIOS is an Insyde BL050 , text interface only with option just to identify the machine devices ; change the timedate clock and change the devices boot order.
USB boot does not work so I am using the internal DVD reader to boot the system .

What I was not expecting was that after a apparently succesfull full HDD installation I got to a BIOS "bricked" machine...

After the install the BIOS froze in the first info screen right after POST, locking the system in the first screen ( even keyborad did not respond) .

At first I though because the HDD ( 20Gb Toshiba Hitachi IDE ) were so old that I had hardware fault .

Afterwards swapped HDDs ( 40Gb HDD ) and  restarted the default install process again with the same behaviour ...
Another try with another HDD  ( more "recent" 80GB ) also with the same behaviour ...

After the 3 failed install attempts, I become suspicious and thought "lets check externally the HDDs" ....
To my surprise all the HDDs were OK,  all with a GPT partition table with 3 partitions .
As I have readed that some old BIOS did not like the GPT partition table, I wrote a simple empty MBR partition via GParted into one of the HDDs;
Put it ( HDD ) in the Laptop, and the system started correctly passing the POST BIOS screen, reporting as expected : No booting HDD found.

Afterwards tried to install ( always wiping the full HDD ) some other BSD flavours ( with some degree of sucess due to display issues ) but none of them locked me out as FreeBSD ...
Installed succesfully some recent Linux es  ( 32bits kernel versions though ) ...


After some research in the forum I found several entries more or less related to this :








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Besides choosing manually the shell and editing the HDD partitions, how in the installer can I define that I needed a MBR partition table ?
How come in the i386 section ( which is supposed to support legacy CPU architectures ) the default installation choices are the defined to the most "recent" ?
Sorry for the rant but I though that this detail could be solved by now ( Release 12 ) .



Thanks in advance


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## bsduck (Dec 15, 2020)

The installer lets you choose the partition scheme you want, default choice is GPT but you can select MBR instead.








						Chapter 2. Installing FreeBSD
					

Guide about how to install FreeBSD, the minimum hardware requirements and supported architectures, how to create the installation media, etc




					www.freebsd.org


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