Another installer failure

[elektroinside]

So, another brand new PC with top hardware (i7-8700k, Gigabyte Z370 Aorus Gaming K3, 32GB Ram, Samsung 850 Pro SSD) and another installer failure. It just hangs right after formatting the HDD, right before partitioning.

Neither OPNsense 17 or 18 installed.

The workaround is easy though: install FreeBSD 11.1 and on top of it install OPNsense (https://github.com/opnsense/update#opnsense-bootstrap)

[dcol]

I sometimes also get hangs when installing. What works for me every time is changing the screen font in the beginning of the install to, I think, 8 X 14. Not sure why this makes a difference but I have run into it many times.
That is using the guided tour. And I remove the swap file too.

I know, really? But it worked for me.

[elektroinside]

The font size? Really? Wow.. how did you even think of that?
I tried everything.. disabling everything there is in the bios, updating the bios, switching from uefi to mbr, guided/manual installation, you name it. Nothing helped, both OPNsense 17 and 18 hanged (or seemingly hanged) exactly at the same step each time, when trying to format the HDD. I say seemingly, because the power button worked, i mean some log lines appeard on top of the frozen blue background of the installer and the PC has shut down gracefully. So i'm not entirely sure anymore that it's a system hang.

[bitman]

happened also on my Jetway board, new install from USB stick 

just pressed the reset button and the reinstall had no issues 

[elektroinside]

I wish it was that easy in my case as well...
Thankfully, OPNsense is versatile enough and can be installed on top of FreeBSD, so that's a relief. Not exactly fine, but good enough workaround.

[Davesworld]

That usually happens with me every time as well. I just log in again, when you see a blank screen after logging in again, hit enter and you will see the installer again depending on where it crashed. While annoying, it has never prevented me from getting through the install and I know the password pretty well after three or four times of having to log in.

Unrelated but useful is the fact that you can log in as root, set up all your interfaces, log out, log in as installer and install and it will install with the network set up the way you wanted, namely ip. This way you can log into the ip right away when it reboots via web browser. I never use 192.168.1.x as the lan network, some modems use 192.168.1.1 as their ip as well as other things, everyone can't be 192.168.1.1 and not everything uses DHCP by default.