Installation via USB stick fails at 2nd boot

hank2121

ok, challenges get more...
three different USB stick installations (Toshiba & SanDisk) on three different laptops (2 Lenovos, one Dell Latitude 7490) let to one (!) successful restart with rEfind (no success with FreeBSD loader at all) .
With all stick installation (even on different ports) it did not find any bootable devices, although first restart worked, at least with reFind, that s weired!? secure boot was off and on UEFI.
So had to repeat all this via DVD installation, then I got a persistent reFind.
At least the Lenovo TP T520 works with wlan (for Dell have to find out); now trying to install AND boot GhostBSD 25.02 and try to upgrade this way, hopefully with VirtualBox included. well, simple and elegant is a bit "tricky" at the moment...

vimanuelt

Thanks for taking the time to test this on multiple systems and installation methods. That’s definitely useful feedback, especially the note that rEFInd booted once while the FreeBSD loader did not.

From your description, it sounds like the issue may be related to inconsistent UEFI handling across the different hardware rather than the installation media itself, particularly since the DVD installation produced a persistent rEFInd setup. The Dell Latitude 7490 and older ThinkPads can behave quite differently with FreeBSD/GhostBSD boot loaders.

It would help if you could share:

whether the USB sticks were written in DD/raw mode or ISO mode,
the exact GhostBSD/FreeBSD image versions used,
and whether the EFI partition remained visible after the failed reboot attempts.

Good to hear the T520 WLAN is working already. Hopefully the GhostBSD 25.02 install and upgrade path goes more smoothly from the DVD-based setup. VirtualBox support should be installable afterward if the base system remains stable.

hank2121

vimanuelt hi, I ll open a new thread and will include the stick issues in there as well. But as this is not a real support & help thread anymore, I d like to move this to Tipps n Tricks and list it all there together. Hope, I do the right point with " Installation tests with GhostBSD 25.02 + 26.1"

hank2121

alright, made quite a lot of install attempts and testing with 5 different laptop models, 4 different ways of install media with 3 different versions of GhostBSD. Before I go completely "nuts" on all details (hehe) or mix things up: let me try a last attempt on a Lenovo G50-45 with A6 cpu & AMDgpu, borrowed from my company lately, which stops on three different levels with trying both USB stick (26.1) and three GhostBSD- and FreeBSD-DVDs. When I m thru with this, I ll post everything, I found out, in here.

In the meantime any idea how to go past this: with GhostBSD 25.02 (DVD) & xlibre-server, it stops at this shell problem, not finding the path and suggesting "Enter" to go to "/rescue/bin" and with 26.1 (DVD/xlibre) & 25.02 (DVD/xorg) it reboots at the attempt to load/configure AMDGPU on this G50 and it all starts from beginning. I tried normal multi user boot, single user and with option 7 (secure settings or so?), but it still drops out at AMDGPU!?
I ll try a FreeBSD installation now and watch the results, but With GhostBSD: is there a chance to get around this AMDGPU problem, cause I couldn t find any settings in BIOS, so what about the boot process from DVD? BTW: no chance via USB stick on that G50, maybe the model is too old from BIOS or something...