memstick not booting on Asus AM1 board. Screwy UEFI implementation?

[shaqan]

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.

[Julien]

i just got this installed last week on one of SUS UEFI Mobo,
download de VGA version and change your bios from AHCI to sata.

[franco]

There are frequent reports in FreeBSD about this since UEFI is still relatively new (10.1 if I recall correctly).

The install images and installed systems in GPT/UEFI are in "hybrid" mode, meaning that they can boot either. BIOS in general is set to either UEFI only or hybrid mode too, but preferring UEFI. If UEFI doesn't work for you, you can switch it off there.

i386 images are all non-UEFI since FreeBSD doesn't have support there. Worst case, us that image.

We can discuss further options in the installer for 17.1; for 16.7 this is really good progress and cost us a lot of time to figure out. We need to give it some time to prove itself.


Cheers,
Franco

[shaqan]

okay, thanks. I did not try i386 memstick option because of more than 4GB RAM onboard.

I am pretty sure its pure "board issue". It seemed to assume that if the detected boot media was in GPT format, it also just had to be UEFI and "legacy boot" just can't be done.

Same problem btw trying 16.1 memstick on same board. Board either does give UEFI error or skips right over to the next boot device in list. Depending on how I set the bios.

[franco]

This is odd, because the 16.1 is only GPT, not UEFI.

We've had this on Twitter recently, how about this workaround? You can then try GPT/UEFI from the installer, if it doesn't work still do the install again with MBR.

use serial with MBR, escape to loader (3) on splash screen, type:

set console="vidconsole"
boot

if install ok, remove serial, do splash dance again, then from the GUI disable serial under System: Settings: Administration

[shaqan]

Anything GPT formatted on memstick makes this board go for UEFI only.Then it does not allow for legacy boot at all. Tried with Linuxes as well. No way to go into legacy boot mode as long as media is in GPT format. No issue with MBR formatted media.

Been months since original post but had router running and had no wish to experiment before next major reinstall.