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Posted: Thu Feb 28, 2008 3:11 pm Post subject: Linux breaks my laptop

Weird one, this.

If I boot my laptop from a live Linux CD it causes a problem. The problem occurs when I switch the laptop on again afterwards and try to boot normally from the hard disk.

During the POST sequence the laptop displays "M52T BIOS 392e/300m" at the top-left of the screen, followed a few seconds later by the normal HP logo, followed by the usual hard disk password prompt. However, by this point the laptop no longer responds to keyboard input so I am unable to enter my password. Even pressing the Return key does not trigger the incorrect password indicator.

The only workaround I've found so far is to pull the CMOS battery for a few seconds, then reconnect it. That seems to clear whatever is making the laptop go funky. Then the "M52T BIOS 392e/300m" message stops appearing, and the laptop boots normally.

Googling for the above message gives this result, which is beyond my currently meagre comprehension.

The laptop is an HP nc6400 with a Radeon X1300 video chipset. I'll also be asking HP about it, but figured I'd ask here as well in case any of the resident geniuses have a clue about what the cause might be.

Guide Dog Joined: 08 Nov 2003 Posts: 8371 Location: MN

i seem to recall a friend having a similar issue... his fix was to plug the keyboard into the right ps/2 port... suspect that might not be your problem though...

Posted: Thu Feb 28, 2008 3:59 pm Post subject:

From the gist of that message.... here's what I gather:

The "M52T BIOS 392e/300m" is not coming from your system BIOS, but being thrown from the video bios. Up until quite recently linux support for ATI products was pretty bad. So I'm thinking whatever driver they're picking by default for the GUI to use is not playing nicely with your mobile radeon chipset.

What in the world it could be doing that causes it to persist after the system is powered off... this I have no idea on. When you boot the live CD does it actually boot all the way up and everything seem to work as it should?

What live CD are you using, and how old is it? First thing I would try is to get either the newest Knoppix or Ubuntu live CD and try one of those... Ubuntu seems to have the best hardware detection of any distro I've ever run, so I'd check that one. Maybe in the latest version they'll have some of the newer radeon video drivers.

If you're already using a newer version.... there should be a command you can pass at boot time to put it in kind of a default VGA mode (Think Windows safe mode, sort of), I would try that and see if you can shutdown and restart afterwards with no BIOS error.

Posted: Thu Feb 28, 2008 5:10 pm Post subject:

I have one of these at work, however I cannot pry myself away from my current ibm x61 and t42. The t42 has a screen/brightness that blows the HP away.

Back to the issue. I realize this isn't quite the same as a live CD. But Ubuntu installs in a live-cd fashion. I've had ubuntu, fedora, simply mephis, and suse and finally vista all installed on the hp without incident.

Posted: Thu Feb 28, 2008 6:13 pm Post subject:

I'd check for BIOS/Firmware updates for the sys/hdd/cd and any other hardware that can take an updated firmware. of course... this would be from HP's site.

the hard lock might not be playing nice. might try without the boot password and see if that unfux's it.

Posted: Fri Feb 29, 2008 10:46 am Post subject:

GibsonSG wrote:
Up until quite recently linux support for ATI products was pretty bad. So I'm thinking whatever driver they're picking by default for the GUI to use is not playing nicely with your mobile radeon chipset.

It doesn't even have to boot fully to cause this. I can interrupt the boot sequence very early on and the problem still occurs.

GibsonSG wrote:
When you boot the live CD does it actually boot all the way up and everything seem to work as it should?

Seems to.

GibsonSG wrote:
What live CD are you using, and how old is it?

Knoppix 5.1.1 (in both CD and DVD flavours), and Backtrack 2.0. Three discs in total.

I couldn't find my Ubuntu 7.10 CD last night, and couldn't be bothered to wait for the download as I was tired and cranky.

I've also got an IBM ThinkPad T40 with a Radeon 7500 video chipset. This one boots happily off any live CD I throw at it, with no further funkiness.

Slymer wrote:
I'd check for BIOS/Firmware updates for the sys/hdd/cd and any other hardware that can take an updated firmware. of course... this would be from HP's site.

the hard lock might not be playing nice. might try without the boot password and see if that unfux's it.

Anything on there for which there's an available firmware update has already been updated. First thing I checked, actually.

As for the password, it's on the hard disk. Pulling the hard disk stops the password prompt - as one would expect - but it doesn't stop the weird behaviour described in my first post.

Posted: Fri Feb 29, 2008 11:11 am Post subject:

yeah... I'm stumped Confused

Posted: Mon Mar 03, 2008 6:42 pm Post subject:

Intriguingly, Ubuntu v7.10 doesn't trigger those symptoms. I just downloaded, burned, and booted from ubuntu-7.10-desktop-i386.iso, and upon reboot that weird M52T message didn't appear, and the machine booted properly.

I wonder if it's down to the individual distro.

Posted: Mon Mar 03, 2008 6:44 pm Post subject:

makes you wonder if the old distros injected anything in the BIOS instead of just reading it for device info

Posted: Tue Mar 04, 2008 4:46 am Post subject:

Slymer wrote:
makes you wonder if the old distros injected anything in the BIOS instead of just reading it for device info

Well, you could dig about in the source and have a look (that's the beauty of Open Source), but it's no secret that distros ship microcode updates for many devices to make them work correctly under Linux. Fedora has a Special Interest Group devoted to it.

On my laptop, Linux patches the microcode on my Intel CPU every boot. I'm not really knowledgeable about how this works exactly, but maybe that's the sort of thing that doesn't get blatted away until you completely power off the machine. It's possible there was just a bug in some version of some firmware shipped with that version of that distro.

It seems the problem is fixed by using a better distro (Ubuntu) so who cares? Wink

Posted: Tue Mar 04, 2008 9:56 am Post subject:

^CMTG

Quote:
It seems the problem is fixed by using a better distro (Ubuntu) so who cares?

...Ah, but we are geeks! It is what we DO!

Posted: Mon Mar 17, 2008 8:08 pm Post subject:

I know with some distro's the fglrx linux driver that is used for the radeon chipset's is considered "experimental" and it is recommended to use a generic driver if you experience problem's.
I also kind of had the same problem with a desktop while using s USB keyboard. It would boot to the login in screen and disable the keyboard, no password entry, no system entry.
Finally plugged in a PS/2 keyboard to get into the system, unplugged that and re-plugged the USB which worked out fine.
Not all machines are created equal it seems.