Solved Can't install - I just get a little white box and a mouse cursor

patmaddox

patmaddox

Solved thanks to SirDice: the boot loader was defaulting to console=serial. I needed to switch it to console=video and it installed and now boots fine.

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I am trying to install 13.1 onto a desktop I built. Motherboard is an ASUS Prime Z590M-Plus w/ Intel 10900k, with a DisplayPort display. The BIOS recognizes the CPU, RAM, and drives correctly.

I'm booting from a USB stick. The boot loader comes up, I boot to multi-user mode and see a bit of the text scrolling by... then it stops at a screen with a little white box in the corner, and a mouse cursor. I see the mouse cursor whether I have a mouse plugged in or not. I can move the mouse cursor around. The white box is not a prompt, and I can't type. I'm expecting the text-based installer, so I'm not sure what's going on.

Any ideas how to get the installer to appear?

Here are some things I've tried, and the results:

- updating BIOS - no changed
- set hint.acpi.0.disabled="1" (from troubleshooting section of handbook) - totally black screen
- hw.vga.textmode=1 (this post) - no change

BD2D162E-E7A1-48E9-9247-DAC6916AB357_1_105_c.jpeg
 
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The 14.0 installer starts up... not sure what the difference is?

I would prefer to use 13.1 since that's what all of my other systems run.

13.1-STABLE doesn't work either...

I thought 10th gen was well-supported by 13.1?
 
Using UEFI or legacy mode/CSM - anything there to tickle?

Can you boot to the live environment from the USB stick - just to see if you can get a shell or can't get that far (don't think you are even getting to that option.)
 
I can't get to the live environment - not getting that far.

I can't enable CSM. According to this thread, that requires a discrete graphics card – and I only have integrated graphics. I think I have the same, or similar motherboard. It has the same chipset at least.
 
Yeah unfortunately I don't see a way to actually disable secure boot. This BIOS has two options: "Default" and "Custom" with no real info on what either of them means. There's an option to delete secure boot keys, which is the closest thing I could to disabling it.

I would not expect 13th gen to work, my understanding is that it's too new.

Perhaps it's an issue with ASUS motherboards though?

Various posts I've come across suggest that "Secure Boot State=Setup" in my BIOS version == "Secure Boot State=Disabled" in older versions. Nevertheless, I cannot enable CSM – possibly because I do not have a discrete graphics card.
 
You should ask ASUS for support into disabling secure boot, and if it is not possible ask for a refund. While booting FreeBSD with custom secure boot keys is somewhat possible,
it requires some extra steps to be done which is in my opinion not worth it if you are not sure that everything else will works without any issue, and that you do not have a use case for secure boot.

PS: does CURRENT boot ? I don't recall that it supported secure boot out of the box
 
13-STABLE runs fine on my Asus Prime Z590-A (Core i7-11700K), 13.1 should work too. Don't use the internal graphics though, have a RTX-3080 in it.

Able to boot both UEFI and CSM. But it appears you can only enable CSM boot if you have a GPU, which sounds weird, haven't tested this myself as I don't want to take out my graphics card.

Do you get to see the "beasty" menu? Make sure console is set to video, it might default to 'serial' (it does on my system for some unknown reason).
 
I was hoping to avoid discrete graphics, just to keep things simple... but that plan seems to have backfired.

Looks like still more research to be done (I'm ~60 hours in at this point).

I am thinking of an AMD build, if I need discrete graphics anyway. The 10900 was a compromise in terms of getting 10 cores, but not need discrete graphics. I'm just not looking forward to going through the whole process all over again - it feels like I'm close, find a working graphics card and this system will work.
 
Just UEFI boot it, and check the boot menu, particularly the 'console' option. Make sure it's set to 'video'.
 
SirDice said:
check the boot menu, particularly the 'console' option. Make sure it's set to 'video'.
Click to expand...

That was it! Thank you! I now have a working 13.1 installation.

I would like to default to video if possible. I set console="vidconsole" in /boot/loader.conf and it kinda worked... it will boot to a login prompt at least. But, I don't see any of the console messages. So it's just black until I get to the login prompt. If I plug / unplug stuff, I don't see any of the console output.

It's not a big deal - I can just remember to select "video" when booting. It would be nice to set the default if I could though.
 
patmaddox said:
I would like to default to video if possible. I set console="vidconsole" in /boot/loader.conf and it kinda worked... it will boot to a login prompt at least. But, I don't see any of the console messages. So it's just black until I get to the login prompt. If I plug / unplug stuff, I don't see any of the console output.
Click to expand...
Try console="efi".
 
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