USB installation succeeds but boots into BIOS

Hi,

the motherboard is a bit of an overkill. Your issue is more than likely one of the onboard NICs is not supported eg I219 If you ad another NIC, not 219 based .

Ian

Ha, the CPU is a bit of an overkill, I5-10600K.

I just grabbed an x520-da2 and after install it still does not boot, and instead goes straight into BIOS.

Hi Jason,

is the SSD in connected as a normal disk drive or connected through a specific motherboard connection. Try substituting a normal disk. I have always had trouble with Asrock motherboards and installing XG, their internal timer is different to other motherboards and does the bios install in default mode not UEFI and finally I assume it is a home version of XG you are using?

Ian

Yes, Home edition.

The WD SSD is an NVMe drive through the motherboards M.2 slot. It is recognized in the BIOS.

I'll grab a sata samsung SSD and see if that works

Connected a WD 1tb HDD I had laying around, but the installer doesnt seem to see it. Only the NVMe SSD.

I do have a debian live USB I can boot to, to diagnose the files theoretically installed on the NVMe ssd?

After some research it appears that this motherboard only supports EFI boot be default and will not allow legacy boot without a PCIe GPU (at least thats what the BIOS is telling me). So it looks like Sophos just doesn't support EFI installs??

Update: found this post: https://community.sophos.com/xg-firewall/f/discussions/122369/no-bootable-device-after-successful-installation

and the answered solution says that the ISO installs a non-efi bootable system despite the installer being EFI. Seems like an insane oversight on Sophos side???

I will be trying to use the solution in that post, but without networking (don't have any spare sfp connectors laying around) it doesn't look like I will be able to manually modify the sophos file system through a live system.

Is it configured for UEFI or legacy boot?  If UEFI, change to legacy.

Asrock motherboards will not allow legacy boot without a PCIe GPU. That is a QUOTE from the bios itself. And after forcing it (throwing in any pcie card) it just boots with a black screen (unable to get back into the BIOS).

Hi Jason,

the thing to remember with sophos is their software is designed for their hardware not us home users. We are a side benefit. In the past people have installed XG on another machine then moved the disk to the preferred machine.

ian

I'll be trying the solution in the other post sometime this week.

I can't install it on another device since it would still fail to boot since sophos XG is not UEFI.

Got a live install going with an efi grub installer. Followed the instructions from the other post I linked above, and the efi install itself went well, no errors.
Went to boot, and definitely got to grub, but selecting either options (SFloader, 18_0_1_396) just gives error: kernel doesn't support EFI handover.

So without being able to boot with legacy BIOS, and without this EFI grub install... I really dont have any other choice but to look elsewhere for a software firewall. Unless anyone can comment on this error with a possible solution?

Got a live install going with an efi grub installer. Followed the instructions from the other post I linked above, and the efi install itself went well, no errors.
Went to boot, and definitely got to grub, but selecting either options (SFloader, 18_0_1_396) just gives error: kernel doesn't support EFI handover.

So without being able to boot with legacy BIOS, and without this EFI grub install... I really dont have any other choice but to look elsewhere for a software firewall. Unless anyone can comment on this error with a possible solution?