# UEFI boot with bugged bios - suggestions for next steps?



## arcadian (Mar 25, 2015)

So far I haven't been able to install FreeBSD 10.1 on my HP Probook 4540s.  The specific failure is that the computer can boot from a FreeBSD CD, but after installation on the hard drive, the system won't boot - just says "no bootable image found".  The system also won't boot from a FreeBSD USB stick.

I've been learning a little more about EFI in the meantime and have gotten another OS installed on the ProBook and would like to try again - just posting to see if someone can validate my approach.

First, I want to confirm I'm using the right distro.  My expectation is that I should be able to plug in a USB stick and dd the 10.1-RELEASE-amd64-uefi-memstick.img file onto it and it will boot.  Is that realistic or are there other steps I need to do?

Second, if the memstick doesn't boot due to a bug (explained more below), should I be able to burn the 10.1-RELEASE-disc1-amd64-uefi-disc1.iso to a CD, boot from that, and install to the hard drive, and would that hard drive then boot using UEFI?

Third, I read about a bug that may be responsible for my issues - it turns out that the HP Probook bios is hardcoded to boot from EFI/BOOT/bootx64.efi by default, although you can select the specific path at boot time if you pause the booting process.  Is there any problem with just moving/renaming that efi file if needed?

Thanks in advance and yeah I know these UEFI implementations are basically a mess that FreeBSD is stuck trying to clean up...


----------



## nslay (Mar 26, 2015)

I went through this recently (mine is an Asus X555LA). Try turning on CSM (in your BIOS), disabling Secure Boot (in your BIOS), and creating an MBR partition table (in FreeBSD's installer) instead of GPT. After installing, it would fail to boot when I used GPT. But it works perfectly with MBR. It's not like you really need GPT on a laptop.


----------



## arcadian (Mar 26, 2015)

Thanks for the reply - I would like to try to stick with UEFI because of my stubborn^H^H^H valid technical reasons.

I went through the UEFI wiki which suggested testing UEFI boot by installing a kernel & distribution on a memstick.  (A nice simple test ha ha...  took me 2 hrs of setup plus 4 hrs of compile + install time.)

It worked to a point - It looked like it got to the FreeBSD boot loader but then after typing "boot" at the OK prompt I got a distorted screen.  Not sure what my next steps are.  Making more progress with Mountain Li^H^H^H another BSD derivative.


----------



## arcadian (Mar 26, 2015)

Great there's a six-month open bug on the distorted screen for the HP ProBook G1 with an identical screen shot.  So that's that I guess.

https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=194063


----------



## georges (Apr 6, 2015)

I had similar problem on my ASUS UEFI only. I ended up dropping to a shell after installation and before exiting and did the following (FreeBSD installed on second internal drive which will not boot after installation)


```
gpart set -a active /dev/ada1
```

where ada1 is my second drive.


----------

