Booting freshly installed GhostBSD 11.1 Fails on ASUS VivoPC

Post your general questions or comments about GhostBSD here!
Post Reply
rsoto
Posts: 2
Joined: Tue Jan 16, 2018 9:33 am

Booting freshly installed GhostBSD 11.1 Fails on ASUS VivoPC

Post by rsoto »

Hi! I was hoping that someone here might have (had) the same problem as me.

I will be talking about (the openly failed attempt to install) Ghostbsd 11.1 in the hardware Asus VivoPC (intel i5).

Yesterday, I tried to install the OS. All went "right", the live system booted without a glitch, the install procedure went on as normal and then I rebooted...then nothing happened. The machine was just unable to boot again. I didnt even make it to the BIOS so I can change the boot order. Nothing. No possibility to mend that.

Today, after reading similar reports in another forum (albeit mostly found on laptops of the same brand), I pulled out the HD as it was one of the suggestions, and let the USB with the live system connected. This time, I made it to the BIOS and could boot the live system, BUT, of course, as the HD is not plug and play, I was unable to re-install Ghostbsd to the HD if I connect it again instantly after booting.

Long story short, HD connected= No BIOS, HD Disconnected= Boot OK; BIOS setting back to normal. what I cannot figure out is, what BIOS configuration will make me (at least marginally) able to boot from the HD again?. The machine was running windows 8 natively, but I purposedly killed Windows by installing GhostBSD to the whole disk. I chose "ZFS" and "Install only the FreeBSD Bootloader" when prompted for it while installing.

Any comments and recommendations highly appreciated! Thanks in advance!
Hecktor
Posts: 27
Joined: Thu Dec 21, 2017 2:43 pm

Re: Booting freshly installed GhostBSD 11.1 Fails on ASUS Vi

Post by Hecktor »

Not sure if I understand the situation, however I will give you my experience and maybe it is the same thing.

Some bios do not like FreeBSD on a bootable USB drive/stick. I had the FreeBSD install on a stick and it hung my bios before the bios was done its stuff. I plugged it in after Windows started booting and it hung the system again. The stick itself works fine on another computer.

So if you have that bios, you'll have issues. I don't know what your hardware looks like. But I could get the computer to boot successfully if I disabled booting from the USB drive in the bios. Not sure what your options, if making the main hard drive not bootable in bios works. Then you would have to boot off of the USB and wipe the drive out, then it will be functional again, unfortunately unable to use GhostBSD.
rsoto
Posts: 2
Joined: Tue Jan 16, 2018 9:33 am

Re: Booting freshly installed GhostBSD 11.1 Fails on ASUS Vi

Post by rsoto »

Thank you! Since there was no option at the BIOS to make the SSD non-bootable, and my attempt to update the BIOS using ASUS' support page mysteriously didn't work either, I went for the uncomfortable option and pulled the SSD out, which I am then going to dev/null using another computer, then I will install other OS, so you are right, the bottom line seems to be that I will be unable to run GhostBSD in this system (sigh). I was so happy that I could use a desktop-oriented BSD at work which doesn't make non-BSD familiar people uncomfortable. The lesson I take from this situation (and other related situations on the same machine such as Debian failing to upgrade, and OpenBSD not even being able to boot, not even the install USB) is that ASUS takes its agreement with Microsoft much too seriously, and its hardware will always complain or cause trouble when trying to run, install or upgrade another OS.

Cheers,
Hecktor
Posts: 27
Joined: Thu Dec 21, 2017 2:43 pm

Re: Booting freshly installed GhostBSD 11.1 Fails on ASUS Vi

Post by Hecktor »

Well I am glad you have the option to get it up and running. It is unfortunate to hear since if it is SSD you are using, that would mean the computer is relatively new. I had hoped this had been an issue on only really old BIOS computers. The computer I was having the issue on is a decade old.

It is unfortunate whatever pattern of bytes that freebsd has just happens to mess up some BIOS. However I guess it was good that it failed on the usb stick for me so I could do more testing than you.

Here is another guy that was having the same issue. He was going to forward some information to the freebsd team. However, being that it is such a weird issue, I don't have much hope.

https://github.com/trueos/trueos-core/issues/1515

Good luck in your future endeavors.
Post Reply