OpenIndiana Distribution

I spent several hours yesterday and today, playing around with bios settings on both machines.

It seems there is no much hope with Asus X399 motherboard, even switching to bios-Legacy mode and disabling ACPI.

I had more success with the HP Z620 (late 2012 model).

By setting bios SATA to IDE compatibility mode, the OpenIndiana Live USB finally booted.

That system is running a Xeon E5 1650, with no builtin graphics, but it has an nvidia GeForce card.

After a few seconds, lightdm fails, and issue message "default failed: transitioned to maintenance". Then I am dropped in openindiana console login.

Still, I finally got to boot!

But, there is another issue:

Unfortunately, when I booted the Live USB image, it forced the HP Z620 worstation, which was fine booting FreeBSD via UEFI, to Bios-legacy mode, effectively botching the boot disk.

Mind you, I was not installing it. Just the mere running of the Live USB image changed the boot setup to legacy mode and leaving a boitched FreeBSD install.

Unfortunately, we do not have any non-UEFI machines here, so I will need to wait to play more with OI when UEFI install image will be available.

This ticket could be probably be split in two subtasks:

- OpenIndiana cannot boot on Asus (and possibly all) X399-type motherboards, possibly due to strong UEFI nature.

- At boot time, OpenIndiana Live USB image seems to force local bios to legacy mode, thus altering already present EFI installs, preventing them for future booting.

I am available to test any image, but I am not at all expert with boot loaders.

What does the following mean exactly?

it forced the HP Z620 worstation, which was fine booting FreeBSD via UEFI, to Bios-legacy mode

The workstation was booting fine via UEFI. FreeBSD 11 installed on the only SSD disk (Samsung 850 Pro)

- In order to boot Live OI image, I changed Bios SATA setting, from AHCI to IDE compatible mode
- Finally I was able to boot from Live OI stick
- ...although lightdm failed (but that is fine, I do not think it is of cocnern here)

- Then, I powered off the machine, extracted the USB stick, and reverted Bios setting, from IDE compatibility to AHCI mode, as it was before.

- But, when I tried to boot into usual FreeBSD, machine would not find the bootloader anymore, giving "No disk found" error.

Surely enough, from Bios, I cannot see any UEFI devices anymore, (while before I could see the Samsung 850)

If I boot from FreeBSD Live rescue disk, I can see the Samsung 850, and I can import its ZFS pool

Since the only thing I did was to boot from OI Live image (without even reaching the final step, that is, login screen), I am thinking somehow OI Live image forced a legacy-bios boot mode on the only available boot disk, which was installed as UEFI (GPT) only.

I could try to reproduce these steps, but I do not want to affect other workstations here, so I would gave to reinstall FreeBSD on this one and try again.

Priyadarshan G.D. wrote:

The workstation was booting fine via UEFI. FreeBSD 11 installed on the only SSD disk (Samsung 850 Pro)

- In order to boot Live OI image, I changed Bios SATA setting, from AHCI to IDE compatible mode
- Finally I was able to boot from Live OI stick
- ...although lightdm failed (but that is fine, I do not think it is of cocnern here)

- Then, I powered off the machine, extracted the USB stick, and reverted Bios setting, from IDE compatibility to AHCI mode, as it was before.

- But, when I tried to boot into usual FreeBSD, machine would not find the bootloader anymore, giving "No disk found" error.

Surely enough, from Bios, I cannot see any UEFI devices anymore, (while before I could see the Samsung 850)

If I boot from FreeBSD Live rescue disk, I can see the Samsung 850, and I can import its ZFS pool

Since the only thing I did was to boot from OI Live image (without even reaching the final step, that is, login screen), I am thinking somehow OI Live image forced a legacy-bios boot mode on the only available boot disk, which was installed as UEFI (GPT) only.

I could try to reproduce these steps, but I do not want to affect other workstations here, so I would gave to reinstall FreeBSD on this one and try again.

Is this issue still actual or can it be closed?

Is this issue still actual or can it be closed?

It can be closed.

I could not fix it with oi, so I switched to OmniOS first, then SmartOS.