[SOLVED] USB Installer - No Option to Install

[bogi]

So I finally got the usb install image to work (way too hard guys... had to boot TrueOS and use that to DD the image, linux or windows would not work)

Now when i boot up I don't get an option to install or live boot.  It seems like it just automatically chooses the live boot option.  I burned the correct image to CD-R and had the same issue.

How do i manually invoke the installer after the live boot part finishes?

[csmall]

Physdiskwrite has yet to fail me creating a bootable USB stick for opnsense.

[bartjsmit]

What happens when you press the I (for India) key when you get the choice between LiveCD and Installer?

FWIW, most boots go straight to the installer. Yours is different somehow.

Bart...

[bogi]

I never get the option to chose (I) or (C).  It boots straight into live cd mode.... that happens with either the usb stick or CD-r i burned.

I downloaded the official images from the opnsense.org website so not sure why that's happening.  The CD version is really strange as I would have worked no issue.  I could see the usb image having trouble as it could be seen as a hard drive.

[franco]

Hi Bogi,

There is nothing hard about writing a sequence of ones and zeros to a physical disk. It's something that sporadic tooling gets wrong, especially in Windows. It's beyond our capabilities to fix this. I would like to stress this...

Screenshots of the boot also help to diagnose this, maybe you are booting an UEFI device which currently has issues and you don't see the prompt and / or use the Serial when the VGA image was more appropriate.

The USB install sometimes sees itself as a disk, but it's not a problem, you cannot install onto it because it's already mounted and errors out appropriately.

There will be new images based on OPNsense 17.1.4 which could fix boot glitches we're currently seeing, although there is no definitive diagnosis in this case.

And regarding booting into live CD... that is the standard now--you can always login from the console or SSH to user "installer" with password "opnsense" to get to the installer. It will say so in the console, see attached picture. If that's not there, there is a problem with the boot that still needs to be identified. That's all there is to it.


Cheers,
Franco

[bogi]

I finally got the usb image onto a flash drive correctly using TrueOS (formerly PC-BSD) .  I'll try writing the image to a usb flash drive via Linux and Windows when the new image comes to see if those work for me.

Once I got the usb stick to boot i was expecting to see a menu asking to press (I) or (C) as stated in the wiki.  I guess the Wiki is outdated. 

During OPNsense's bootup process... the part right before it gets to were you have to normally logon... There will be a brief message saying something like

"Press Any Key now to invoke the early installer"

I missed that message all the previous times I was booting up to try to install OPNsense.  When I did press a key at that point it started the guided installer like I was expecting. And I'm good to go now.

[franco]

Ok, we'll update the wiki shortly. New images with 17.1.4 will shift the installer to the end of the boot, the former early installer has been replaced with a command line importer to replace the necessary use case there.


Cheers,
Franco