Ghost Won't Boot After Install

frogprince

After fixing my wifi problem, I went ahead and installed Ghost on my Dell Latitude 7490. I set boot to UEFI, and made sure that Secure Boot was unclicked. The installation seemed to go well, the installer found the m.2 SATA HD with a full disk install, and then finished without error. But when I tried to boot the new system, I got an error message that there was no bootable medium available. The "Disks" selection in the bios sees the drive, but I don't see it in my boot order choice. I assumed that this was some kind of UEFI/TPM error, but I've gone through the bios settings repeatedly and found nothing that was keeping the system from booting. The laptop arrived with Win 11 Pro, and booted just fine with that, so I don't think that I have a hardware issue. I can boot the laptop with a Puppy Linux USB, and that distro sees the hard drive and correctly identifies it as a ZFS partition. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to proceed? Thanks in advance.

vimanuelt

It may be worth completely wiping the disk metadata before reinstalling. I've run into cases where gpart destroy -F alone wasn't enough to remove all GPT metadata. Clearing both the primary and backup GPT headers (or using sgdisk --zap-all from a Linux live USB) before starting the installer allowed GhostBSD to create a clean GPT layout and install the EFI bootloader correctly.

frogprince

vimanuelt: thanks for your quick response. Your suggestion makes sense, so I used a Mint USB to run the sgdisk --zap-all command. It returned a message stating that both records were erased, and then I went back and reinstalled Ghost. Unfortunately, I still got the "no bootable medium available" message. As an experiment, I used the above Mint USB stick to install Mint on the laptop as a test, and Mint installed, booted, and ran fine, further proof that it's not the hardware. Any other suggestions, or things I can look at to help the process along? Thanks again.

vimanuelt

Can you select rEFInd during installation and give that a try?

vimanuelt

Also, when the installation completes, open a terminal and provide the output of this command: gpart show

You should see something like this.

=> 40 976773088 nda0 GPT (466G)
40 532480 1 efi (260M)
532520 941965312 2 freebsd-zfs (449G)
942497832 34265088 3 freebsd-swap (16G)
976762920 10208 - free - (5.0M)

frogprince

vimanuelt : Ooh, vimanuelt, looky, looky:

ghostbsd@livecd ~ % gpart show
\=> 34 8292981 da0 GPT (15G) [CORRUPT]
34 25 1 freebsd-boot (13K) ghostbsd@livecd ~ % gpart show
\=> 34 8292981 da0 GPT (15G) [CORRUPT]
34 25 1 freebsd-boot (13K)
59 21 - free - (11K)
80 4096 2 efi (2.0M)
4176 8288839 - free - (4.0G)

\=> 34 8292981 iso9660/GHOSTBSD GPT (15G) [CORRUPT]
34 25 1 freebsd-boot (13K)
59 21 - free - (11K)
80 4096 2 efi (2.0M)
4176 8288839 - free - (4.0G)

\=> 34 8292981 diskid/DISK-0465TD8NDTMBBJFA GPT (15G) [CORRUPT]
34 25 1 freebsd-boot (13K)
59 21 - free - (11K)
80 4096 2 efi (2.0M)
4176 8288839 - free - (4.0G)

\=> 40 500118112 ada0 GPT (238G)
40 512 1 freebsd-boot (256K)
552 494872576 2 freebsd-zfs (236G)
494873128 5234688 3 freebsd-swap (2.5G)
500107816 10336 - free - (5.0M)
59 21 - free - (11K)
80 4096 2 efi (2.0M)
4176 8288839 - free - (4.0G)

\=> 34 8292981 iso9660/GHOSTBSD GPT (15G) [CORRUPT]
34 25 1 freebsd-boot (13K)
59 21 - free - (11K)
80 4096 2 efi (2.0M)
4176 8288839 - free - (4.0G)

\=> 34 8292981 diskid/DISK-0465TD8NDTMBBJFA GPT (15G) [CORRUPT]
34 25 1 freebsd-boot (13K)
59 21 - free - (11K)
80 4096 2 efi (2.0M)
4176 8288839 - free - (4.0G)

\=> 40 500118112 ada0 GPT (238G)
40 512 1 freebsd-boot (256K)
552 494872576 2 freebsd-zfs (236G)
494873128 5234688 3 freebsd-swap (2.5G)
500107816 10336 - free - (5.0M)

So the boot files are corrupt. The download sha256 sum checks out ok, Windows ran initially, and MINT installs and runs fine, so the hardware looks ok. Does Ghost not support this particular NVMe drive? ( SK Hynex SC311 S ) A quick search showed no such difficulty. Or ??

Thanks again for your patient help.

vimanuelt

Looking at that output, I don't think the problem is the SSD or corrupted boot files. The [CORRUPT] messages are from the GhostBSD installer USB (da0), not the internal drive. The internal disk (ada0) looks fine: it has a GPT, a ZFS partition, and swap.

The thing that stands out is that there is no EFI partition on ada0. Instead, the installer created a freebsd-boot partition. That usually indicates a BIOS/legacy boot installation rather than a UEFI one.

Since the Dell is set to UEFI mode and the firmware does not show the drive as a boot option, I would first verify that the GhostBSD installer itself was booted in UEFI mode. Dell systems often show the USB device twice in the boot menu, for example:

UEFI: <USB device>
<USB device>

The first entry is the one you want.

From the GhostBSD live environment, could you check:

sysctl machdep.bootmethod

and:

efibootmgr -v

Also:

gpart list ada0

would confirm whether an EFI System Partition exists.

The SSD is unlikely to be the issue. The SC311 is an M.2 SATA device, and the fact that Windows and Mint both boot from it shows the hardware path is working. The question is whether GhostBSD installed an EFI bootloader, not whether the disk is supported.

frogprince

Wow..
Yes, I did perform the install from legacy mode, because the USB installer would not complete the boot from the UEFI version. When I booted the UEFI version, after the GhostBSD boot screen, I get:

` Autoboot in 4 seconds. [Space] to pause
Loading kernel...
/boot/kernel/kernel text=0x1872db text=0xdd78e4 text=0x4495e5 data=0x180+0xe80 data=0x1962e0+0x469d20 0x8+195db0+0x8+0x1ba1e8|
Loading configured modules...
/boot/modules/utouch.ko size 0x8808 at 0x2155000
can't find /etc/hostid
/boot/kernel/cryptodev.ko size 0x8808 at 0x2155000
/data/ramdisk.ufs size=0x16f0000
/boot/kernel/geom_mirror.ko size 0x21428 at 0x384e000
/boot/kernel/zfs.ko size 0x620c10 at 0x3e91000
/boot/kernel/geom_eli.ko size 0x1c708 at 0x3e91000
/boot/entropy size=0
/boot/kernel/geom_uzip.ko size 0x9758 at 0x3eae000
staging 0xae600000 (not copying) tramp 0xb9968000 PT4 0xb995f000
Start @ 0xfffffff80388000 ...
Loading splash ok
EFI framebuffer information:
addr, size 0xd0000000, 0x7e9000
dimensions 1920 x 1080
stride 1920
masks 0x00ff0000, 0x0000ff00, 0x000000ff, 0xff000000'

At this point, the installer freezes. I've tried the install with both MATE and XFCE, and on two different USB drives, and get the same result. I've tried it with legacy boot both selected and deselected, and in both standard mode and safe mode. Interestingly, if I boot one of these same USB's on my Dell 7760, the installer boots fine onto the desktop from UEFI mode. But I can't answer your other questions, since UEFI mode won't boot. I hope this isn't a bios problem!

vimanuelt

frogprince
You can submit a bug request at:
ghostbsd/issuesissues/new/choose

frogprince

vmanuelt: thank you very much for all the patient help you provide for this forum. I have submitted the bug report with the information from the above posts. Almost all the posts that I've found on this issue outside this forum come from people attempting to install MacOS on this machine, and isn't relevant. If I find a workaround, I'll post it.