# Crippled laptop, any thoughts?



## oceanofapathy (Jul 1, 2012)

Hi there, I was a FreeBSD user for many years back in the day, like 15 years ago. I have this laptop, HP Mini 110-3135dx, it gets very light use.  I only use it for web browsing, VNC to my main computer, and taking some notes. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834157616

It was running Win 7 Starter.  Suddenly it wouldn't boot up.  BIOS went fine, got to the Windows logo and there it sits.  Ugh.  I tried the auto-restore function (which is software that resides on another partition on the hard drive.  Didn't work.  Tried the diagnostics that came with the PC (hard drive, memory, a couple others), all passed.

I used Crunchbang Linux to get in, download a couple files I needed.  Next I tried installing Crunchbang.  To be honest, I don't really care what OS it runs, like I said, light duty.  It didn't work, Crunchbang only worked in live mode, it would hang during installation.

Tried Ubuntu, Fedora, all hang.

I got FreeBSD 9.0 to install actually, but only in safe mode. It is now installed, but will only boot in safe mode. I guess my main question is: can I get x-windows to run in safe mode?  I don't see anything x-windows related in sysinstall.  Is that because it's in safe mode, or has something drastic changed in the last decade since I last ran FreeBSD? If I could figure out WHAT part of the laptop is broken, I could probably run a custom kernel that ignored that hardware.  So I guess now I need to figure out what's broken?

The last line that shows says:

```
acpi_lid0L <Control Method Lid Switch> on acpi0
```

Terrible-quality photo of screen is attached (if I did it right).

I presume it's whatever is after that that doesn't work. When I run *dmesg* in safe mode, the above line doesn't show up, so I guess that's skipped. Help! What next? I'm open to any OS, any sort of solution that can at LEAST run VNC so I can view my main computer screen. One more thing, I likely won't be able to respond for another week, so my apologies if I seem to disappear.  

Thanks!
-Porter


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## izotov (Jul 11, 2012)

I do not know too much about safe mode so I do not know if there is X or not.
Otherwise there might be some problems with acpi on your machine (as that is the last message). You might try disabling acpi in the /etc/loader.conf:

```
hint.acpi.0.disabled="1"
```


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## throAU (Jul 11, 2012)

If live CDs work but install fails, i suspect IO/storage subsystem issues.  Time to download and run some proper hardware tests - most BIOS tests are pretty crap.  I know HPs are for certain, we run Elitebooks at work and the built in hardware test rarely picks up faults that other tests do.


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## da1 (Jul 18, 2012)

One thing you can do is boot verbose and see where the machine gets stuck. Post the output here so we can have a look.

PS: to boot verbose, at the first prompt, drop to the shell and type

```
boot -v
```


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