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16.7 Legacy Series / memstick not booting on Asus AM1 board. Screwy UEFI implementation?
« on: July 24, 2016, 10:27:01 pm »
I have Asus AM1M-A motherboard. It's one of those AMD AM1 SOC boards. It has UEFI bios on it and had I had any hair in the first place, I would have tore all off today.
I downloaded memstick image for AMD64, VGA. I did "burn" it to the memstick using dd=OPNsense-16.7.r2-OpenSSL-vga-amd64.img of=/dev/sda2 bs=16k (I used Linux machine for this)
upon POST, banged F8, got boot menu, selected memstick, hit Enter and got after 3 seconds thrown into UEFI bios. Over and over. Changed hard drives, USB sticks, USB slots etc. Finally tore the case open, grabbed DVD device and attached it to the router. Then burned another file to blank DVD (OPNsense-16.7.r2-OpenSSL-cdrom-amd64.iso) and tried it.
Okay, cdrom boot worked. I installed using "Guided" setup and choose GPT. After reboot got black screen and message on it stating "the system found unauthorized changes on the firmware operating system or uefi drivers"
Tried memstick quickly again but now intentionally selected UEFI (memstick name) from F8 menu. Got black screen and identical message. Previously with memstick, I had tried booting it by "legacy method" since it was manually enabled in BIOS already and should have taken priority over UEFI crap.
I have installed OPNSense on another Asus board which also has UEFI Bios (Asus M5A99X Evo R2 which is AM3+ board in ATX size, leftover from my old gaming system) and had no such opera with it. I could force "Legacy Oprom" option and board would listen booting GPT formatted media without issues or complaining about firmwares. I used it briefly in a router and also used OPNSense installed on it.
Not so with this AM1 board. Seems like only option to use OPNSense installed on it is by using DVD and only doing MBR install.
Conclusion. I hate UEFI.
Any of you, who can't seem to get OPNSense on memstick to boot, try it by using cdrom based install and go with MBR option under "Guided setup". Might get over the issue.
I downloaded memstick image for AMD64, VGA. I did "burn" it to the memstick using dd=OPNsense-16.7.r2-OpenSSL-vga-amd64.img of=/dev/sda2 bs=16k (I used Linux machine for this)
upon POST, banged F8, got boot menu, selected memstick, hit Enter and got after 3 seconds thrown into UEFI bios. Over and over. Changed hard drives, USB sticks, USB slots etc. Finally tore the case open, grabbed DVD device and attached it to the router. Then burned another file to blank DVD (OPNsense-16.7.r2-OpenSSL-cdrom-amd64.iso) and tried it.
Okay, cdrom boot worked. I installed using "Guided" setup and choose GPT. After reboot got black screen and message on it stating "the system found unauthorized changes on the firmware operating system or uefi drivers"
Tried memstick quickly again but now intentionally selected UEFI (memstick name) from F8 menu. Got black screen and identical message. Previously with memstick, I had tried booting it by "legacy method" since it was manually enabled in BIOS already and should have taken priority over UEFI crap.
I have installed OPNSense on another Asus board which also has UEFI Bios (Asus M5A99X Evo R2 which is AM3+ board in ATX size, leftover from my old gaming system) and had no such opera with it. I could force "Legacy Oprom" option and board would listen booting GPT formatted media without issues or complaining about firmwares. I used it briefly in a router and also used OPNSense installed on it.
Not so with this AM1 board. Seems like only option to use OPNSense installed on it is by using DVD and only doing MBR install.
Conclusion. I hate UEFI.
Any of you, who can't seem to get OPNSense on memstick to boot, try it by using cdrom based install and go with MBR option under "Guided setup". Might get over the issue.