Re: Thinkpad BIOS status

> Date: Sun, 22 Dec 2002 03:55:41 +1300
> From: kit <[email protected]>
> Sender: [email protected]
> 
> Hi people
> 
> For a while there was a problem with thinkpad bioses recognising Freebsd Slices 
> but then it was fixed and I had an idea that it may have come back in a later
> revision..  I've not been able to find anything recent but 
> does anypone know what the current state of the play is and whether the 
> latest bios for the A20m (1.12 i think) is able to be used?

All recent BIOS releases have been fine. There was a bug in early BIOS
releases for several A, X, and T ThinkPads that would cause a system
lock-up when any partition with the final nibble of 0x5 was
detected. FreeBSD uses 0xA5, and was caught by this.

IBM put out a fixed BIOS that worked, but the next update, just a few
days later, re-introduced the bug. It was removed again, as I recall,
about 2 weeks later and has not re-appeared.

If you have a remotely current version of BIOS on an A, R, T, or X
series ThinkPad, you should be fine. (I am sending this from my T30
with bios updated about a month ago from the delivered BIOS which also
worked fine.)

R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer
Energy Sciences Network (ESnet)
Ernest O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)
E-mail: [email protected]			Phone: +1 510 486-8634

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