Need help booting SuperMicro UEFI board

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antioch18

New Member
Dec 17, 2018
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I recently upgraded my 7-year old SuperMicro board to a new one (A2SDi-HLN4F running firmware v3.6) and am having difficulty booting it - I believe due to UEFI issues.

Specifically I'd like to boot the trusty UltimateBootCD to run memtest and other system check tools, however I don't believe this will boot in UEFI (Non-CSM) mode. I would like to hope that the BIOS will let me boot non-UEFI software, but I can't figure out how to enable it.

I've set the "BOOT MODE" to Dual and Legacy but neither will display my USB boot drive (however, I should note that it does appear as an option in the UEFI boot menu, but it will fail to boot). Secure Boot is also disabled. What other settings do I need to change? (I'm guessing something with CSM but I haven't been able to find a setting for this yet).

Any help would be greatly appreciated as this is a hard blocker for me (am planning to run OpenMediaVault which also doesn't support UEFI at the moment).

Note: my USB boot stick works just fine on an older non-server UEFI PC motherboard I have, so I'm at a loss for what to do.

Thank you very much for your help!

PS - I've also noticed that it takes a darn long time to POST on this board - it's taking much longer than any non-server UEFI PC board I own. These PEI and DXE steps (part of UEFI?) take at least a minute to run through. Is there any way to disable/skip this?
 

EffrafaxOfWug

Radioactive Member
Feb 12, 2015
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I have the same board, and no there doesn't seem to be any way to invoke traditional/BIOS boot via CSM.

Mine's running an older BIOS so it's possible the CSM options have been added but when I set it up at least it seemed to be UEFI-only - where do you find your "boot mode" switch? I've not seen this in my BIOS and the manual doesn't make any reference to it.

Taking at least a minute to POST is pretty usual for server boards, especially ones with IPMI.
 

RageBone

Active Member
Jul 11, 2017
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This rather sound like a bad USB stick, or a corrupt image or a bad flash.
Some USB ports can be picky too.
Maybe try a usb2.0 one.

You could try booting the image over ipmi.
 

antioch18

New Member
Dec 17, 2018
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Mine's running an older BIOS so it's possible the CSM options have been added but when I set it up at least it seemed to be UEFI-only - where do you find your "boot mode" switch? I've not seen this in my BIOS and the manual doesn't make any reference to it.
It's just right there in the BOOT settings menu -- but I can't find anything about CSM. This may be what's missing?
upload_2019-1-28_21-54-11.png

This rather sound like a bad USB stick, or a corrupt image or a bad flash. Some USB ports can be picky too. Maybe try a usb2.0 one.

You could try booting the image over ipmi.
The same stick with the same image works on a different board, and I've tried loading the image via IPMI but it doesn't display in the boot select menu. But clearly UltimateBootCD and others don't have EFI support (there's no EFI folder in the boot stick).

Does anyone know of any EFI bootable toolsets that provide similar functionality? Memtest, disk test, CPU burnin, partition editing, etc.
 

EffrafaxOfWug

Radioactive Member
Feb 12, 2015
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That must be a setting from the newer BIOS then, it doesn't appear in mine (nor the manual). It does make it look like SM have added a legacy/CSM boot option - I'm assuming if you switch that to UEFI, the boot priorities change label to "UEFI boot option #..."?

Clearly in your case it's not working though and I reckon you'll need to speak to SM support to ascertain whether a) the legacy boot menu isn't supposed to be there (like I said earlier it's not shown in the manual) or b) it is meant to be there but isn't working for whatever reason (likely necessitating a BIOS fix from them).

Depends what you're looking for in a bootable distro really but most of them have EFI support, I'm fond of SystemRescueCD myself as it's relatively tiny but has a wealth of handy tools.
 

antioch18

New Member
Dec 17, 2018
19
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1
That must be a setting from the newer BIOS then, it doesn't appear in mine (nor the manual). It does make it look like SM have added a legacy/CSM boot option - I'm assuming if you switch that to UEFI, the boot priorities change label to "UEFI boot option #..."?
Indeed, it does change the listings:

upload_2019-1-28_22-56-51.png

And, yes, there are many things not mentioned in the manual, including the CSM setting, but with a fresh set of eyes I found it under the Security > Secure Boot settings:
upload_2019-1-28_22-57-29.png

With this enabled I was able to boot my non-EFI images. Although, one of them failed to load via IPMI mounting but worked fine when physically connected via USB. Odd. In any case, it seems to work so you may be interested in updating your BIOS?

Thanks for the SystemRescueCD recommendation - that's now in my toolbox!

(leaving this information for posterity)
 

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EffrafaxOfWug

Radioactive Member
Feb 12, 2015
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Aha - I did see in the manual a mention of the CSM setting but a) it was only mentioned in the manual "for manufacturing debugging purposes" and b) it also wasn't present on my board. It looks like the more recent BIOSes have finally added CSM support so yes, now I've got a good reason to upgrade! Oh how I wished SM would furnish us with changelogs...

(FWIW this was because getting mdadm RAID1 to work as a boot volume under EFI is, thanks to the short-sightedness of the EFI spec, a complete pain in the arse; now with CSM I can look at switching back to MBR. Dunno if this affects OMV or not but I guess it might if you want an mdadm RAID1 as boot'n'root)