New OpnSense 22.1 install fails to boot from hard drive

[Captain Spunk]

New OpnSense 22.1 install fails to boot from hard drive

I recently dug up an old Acer Aspire X1430 system and thought it might make a nice quiet OpnSense option.
Having used OS in the past I figured it would be a quick job, but unfortunately after several hours of mucking about I had to abandon it.

I started by creating a bootable USB stick (VGA version) with Rufus the same way I’ve done it before, then just followed the installation procedure to install it to a hard drive. No problems there.
After installing, OS won’t boot though. The system just says “Error: no boot disk has been detected or the drive has failed” and that’s that.
First time around I just loaded the .bz2 file into Rufus and went for it. Second time I unpacked it first and loaded the resulting .img file. Both had the exact same effect.

After several tries with different USB sticks I then proceeded to install OS onto one of them instead of a hard drive, and oddly enough this worked fine.

I suspect this issue could have something to do with UEFI and/or GPT but so far I’m having a hard time pinpointing the exact cause.

Unfortunately the bios in this system does not provide an option to switch between UEFI and legacy boot, and there’s no CSM and Secure Boot on/off switches either.

After installing OS, the bios recognizes the installed hard drive as UEFI bootable and it’s listed in the boot menu, for some reason it just doesn’t work.
Funny thing is, after a number of tries I got curious and installed Kubuntu 22.10 from a bootable USB stick, and wouldn’t you know it… It booted without a problem, and like OS it was recognized as UEFI by the system’s bios.

For my final try I used dd on Linux to create the bootable USB, the result was as before.

Seeing as this is a rather simple system with a bios that doesn’t offer a lot of options to play with, I’m not sure if there’s anything else to try.

If anyone can think of something, I’d be happy to test it.