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I appreciate your candor. I will look into IPfire as I will be rolling forward with my AMD system. And when I'm ready to retire my 4th gen is UEFI system, I will give OPNsense another try.

Thanks again!
-Dan

That's too bad. I was really preferring OPNsense based on the features and ethos.  Why do you think PFsense would be a better fit for me? Just based on the ease of installation on my target system?

Thanks,
-Dan

When you say "basic" settings, you mean set the SATA mode to "IDE" vs RAID or AHCI? Sure, I've kept it in IDE mode.  I set all the BIOS settings to the "failsafe" settings.  Just for reference I just tried PFsense, and it installed with out blinking.  So, really not sure what the problem could be with the OPNsense installer.

Thanks,
Dan

Hi, yes, all three systems are x64 based systems.
1) Core 2 Quad, Q6600 8 GB RAM
2) Phenom II x4 965, 12 GB RAM
3) Core 2 Quad, (I forget the processor number) extreme, 3.3 GHz, 8 GB RAM.

I also tried turning off ACPI and turning on Safe mode from the boot menu, but no success with that either.

Thanks,
-Dan

Hi,
I found the Reddit and Github threads about how to install opnsense on a legacy BIOS PC. However, I have not had success following these steps and need some help. I have tried writing the vga and serial images to a usb stick with rufus, physdiskwrite, win32diskimage and etcher, followed by coverting the partition to MBR and setting the EFIsys partition to active using Active Partition Manager.  I've burned the DVD iso to a DVD and written it to a USB stick and booted from both.  I've tried these permutations on three different legacy systems that I have.  I get one of two results when trying to boot from USB (or dvd) prepared the way described above (and yes, I use diskpart to clean the usb partition before each attempt):
1) I get the initial menu and the live os starts to boot. Then some kind of kernel panic happens and I get dumped to a db> prompt
-OR-
2) everything loads smoothly but I get a black screen before I get to the login prompt for the installer.

So, I am at my wits end and don't know how to install OPNsense 20.7.  Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks!
-Dan

I am at my wits end with trying to install Opnsense 20.7 on any of the three legacy biosbased PC systems I have. I saw the Reddit and Github posts about writing the image to usb and then using Active partition manager to change the boot type to MBR and set the EFIsys partition active.  I've tried this with the vga, dvd and serial amd64 images, and used Rufus, win32diskwrite, physdiakwrite and etcher... and I get consistently one of two results:
1) some kind of kernel panic and I get dumped to a db> prompt -OR-
2) I get thru the initial menu and the system starts loading the live disk and then gives me a black screen before I ever get the login prompt.

So, I have tried these Active Partition Manager steps on the vga and serial (DVD is just written, and returns a message that the image is not bootable) with the 4 different image write tools on three different legacy systems ... I've lost count of how many permutations that is ... but no success on any attempt!!

Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks,
-Dan