Compaq Presario F700 - Weird and getting weirder

[Gravian]

“A case of OSx86 installation issues- in the twilight zone.”

 

I say that because, that’s what this feels like. I’m trying to install on a Presario F700 and it’s giving me the strangest issues. Has anyone tried this? I have installed or attempted to install OSx86 on just about every other PC that has come across my computer rack in my closet (about 10 machines total) and have had varying stories of success and failure, from the moderate success of my dv6000, which required driver hunting for the wireless, video and still won’t sleep, to the complete failure of my gaming desktop, in which nothing I have found on the forums or the web in general wants to let it see it’s NForce SATA, to the strange and unusual success such as installing Tiger on a AMD Athlon XP rig with everything but the sound working out of the box. I know, WTF? It’s only SSE according to CPU-Z, but it runs Tiger full speed without crashing 99% of the time. I haven’t tried putting leopard on it, and I don’t plan to since doing so would probably work and thus cause a rip in the fabric of the universe due to its lack of SSE2. Just kidding. I plan to.

 

But, as far as strangeness goes, this REALLY takes the cake; I don’t even know where to begin, so I will start by posting some specs:

 

 

 

--Presario F700 series, it said F730US on the box. I’m going to go by that, but Compaq has a long standing history of shafting the end user when it comes to specs. …And for that matter user serviceable design.

 

--AMD Athlon 64X2 Dual Core Processor TK-55 (512 L2Cache – 1800 MHz) SSE3 for sure, checked it in CPU-Z.

 

--Memory: 1024 MBs DDR2

 

--Video/Chipset: NVidia GeForce GO 6150 Series. Shared VRAM – Yes I know there are issues with this, and there are proposed fixes, unfortunately I haven’t gotten that far yet. So far it seems to run fine in the installer as long as I don’t have it set to anything else than 64 MB.

 

--Sound: Sound Blaster Pro. Yeah I know, problems here too, I’m hoping for some luck on this.

 

--Ethernet: I have no idea, but the installer hates it with a passion, I’ll figure that out later too, there are probably drivers around for it since I’ve seen enough threads about Ethernet drivers to fill a small quarry.

 

--Wireless: Not sure about that, but its Broadcom and the BCM4311 drivers sort of like it. I’ll explain “sort of” in a bit.

 

--Hard Drive: 120 GB SATA. Wait till you hear the story with this.

 

 

 

There are a few more specs, but I doubt any of them would mean jack diddily, but just in case here is the page: reviews.cnet.com/laptops/compaq-presario-f730us/4507-3121_7-32716569.html?tag=specs

 

Ok, to start from the top, I began with Tiger and tried about every distro in existence, and then I moved to using the iATKOS. The first thing I found with all attempts was the DVD wouldn’t boot unless I have it in –v mode. This is weird enough as it is, as –v is just supposed to display diagnostic messages, right?

 

Well for some reason when I don’t use –v it gives me the THOU SHALT NOT PASS sign and hangs, but when I do it boots most of the time, even if with some difficulty. I’m no Linux wizard, but I am trying to learn this stuff, so if there are any other flags I could try feel free to share. So far I have tried –v –x and –s to try a few suggestions I found.

 

When I do boot with –v, things get even stranger, I’ve never seen the “Unexpected resend request from PS/2 Controller” error before on any other machine I’ve booted the installer on, but most of the people getting it on the forums get it consistently, I for some reason get it off and on, and in varying amounts. Sometimes I get it repeatedly so much it scrolls for several pages and just gets stuck like that, sometimes I don’t get it at all, sometimes I get it a few times and then it stops and behaves normally. I know it has something to do with the track pad and the keyboard, because it was originally not seeing them 90% of the time, but I found a way around that: Plugging a USB keyboard and mouse into the right side USB slot, for some reason that makes it WORK 90% of the time.

 

So at this point I’ve managed to get into the installer and able to control it, now the next thing I find is that the thing won’t see my NForce SATA. My first thought is “Oh {censored}, it’s my gaming rig all over again.” And For the longest time I thought that was right, as I tried most of the fixes on the forums before deciding it was a lost cause for about a month. Then came Zhephyroth (that name makes me want to stab something, it really does).

 

My first attempt with it was fruitless and I gave up for about a week and a half as I got the same results as before, but then I picked it up again out of boredom to try something different, something that I honestly didn’t expect to work. I figured since the darn thing won’t see the video under XP and won’t see the wireless under Linux no matter what I did (I even tried using drivers from other packs for the video and about 10 different manual wireless fixes) I might as well try doing a low level format and see if it would see it then since the laptop was just gathering dust as long as it had Vista on it. Yeah, it’s one of those laptops, which shipped with Vista, and they didn’t bother to release drivers for XP. BUYER BEWARE.

 

Anyway, the low level format worked, and I actually managed to get the installer to see the hard drive, format it, go thru with the install and restart. But that is as far as I got, and where things get even stranger: When it restarts it gets stuck at a blinking underscore ( _ ) and goes no further. No hard drive read, no CD read, not even an error. When I restart back into the installer disk, there is no OS X icon on the disk in the installer and Startup Disk doesn’t see it. None of the fixes I've found for this on the forums with search have worked, not setting the volume as bootable (it was already bootable, but I tried anyway), not setting the partition as active (I got a “Device could not be accessed exclusively” error, but if the display is to be believed there is now a star by the OS X partition so it seems to have stuck) and I even tried reformatting the disk and setting the partition tables to both GUID and MBR and selecting the proper EFI package for both in customize. So after about 50 restarts and 12 installs I had noticed some more unusual stuff, every time I restart the laptop seems to act up in a different way, sometimes the Ethernet would fail completely and end up skipped, sometimes it would talk with the system for a while and then fail, about 1/5th of the time the wireless would fail and the on/off switch would glow pink, a combination of the on and off colors, and when it did the Laptop would do the strangest thing: the computer would run at about half speed and if I didn’t move the mouse cursor constantly the screen wouldn’t refresh after a while. About 1 out of every 12 boots I would get a “Still waiting on root device” hang that would go away when I restarted. Sometimes the Track pad and the built in keyboard would work, and not the USB ones, sometimes the USB ones would work and not the built in stuff, sometimes both, sometimes nothing. Now I have seen some of this stuff in other installs I did, and most of it would go away completely once I got the system to actually install, but never *all at once.*

 

Now, if you are to go by Occam’s razor, the logical assumption is not that all the laptops systems have problems, but more likely one single device in its design that is sitting somewhere critical in the bus that is just wonky enough to cause issues with the installer. I’m sure if I got it to install and boot it would stop being troublesome, like the Ethernet on my older AMD desktop or the USB on the newer one that both acted like this during boot.

 

As par the course, I’ve also tried burning the DVD several different times on all different speeds, not once has it made a difference, I even tried safe mode which won’t even boot, I don’t think I missed anything, I’ve searched the forums high and low and even looked around the net for other guides, and so far I haven’t found anything describing this. It’s just really irritating because system profiler seems to see a lot of the hardware that I would need right away out of the box, but I can’t get the darn thing to boot. Maybe EFI emulation just doesn’t work with my machine? I mean, it is a 2007 model. The only thing I can think of to try is Leo4All, and I need more DVDs before I can do that (I went thru a 25 Pack in three days between backing up and this).

 

 

So, any good advice ye almighty gurus? Or am I royally screwed?

[martguy]

Member c_c has been looking into this laptop for awhile. The problem would seem to be with the i8042 PS2 controller. I have tried several install disks as well, finally Leo4All V1 seems to work for me (still with the issues you mention).

I have successfully installed Linux on the machine. I used Ubuntu, set acpi_sci=level to get the suspend working, and then I use the "fwcutter" method to install the 4311 firmware (search synaptic for 4311, choose second option listed).

I'm hoping newer PS2 kexts will eventually allow stable operation of my F730US, but it's hard to do any serious work on my laptop with the way it is now.

 

See this link http://forum.insanelymac.com/index.php?sho...rt=#entry575038

[Lunks]

Some weird things have happened on my HP as well. Here's what has make it work most of the time:

1. Try to plug an USB mouse.

2. DON'T use touchpad/keyboard while Leopard is loading. Any click makes it not working again.

3. Find massface's TX1000 package and use Geforce stuff from it.

Now the unusual part:

Leopard seems to run smoothly/hangs less times (none so far following these instructions):

4. Even booting to hard drive, press ESC to select your boot device and select your hard drive. For some reason, this changes something.

5. Use -f to boot up. This gives NForceSATA time to load or smth like that. Also try cpus=1 -f if you experience something odd/slowness.

 

Hopefully you get it to work.

[spacklewoof]

for keyboard issues and "stuttering" Try the kernel parm

idlehalt=0

See this post also:

http://forum.insanelymac.com/index.php?sho...=104539&hl=

for broadcom info

 

-w00f