UEFI BIOS - OS tries to install files onto audio device

English Install/Boot/Login
#1

I ran into a problem with a brand new motherboard and UEFI BIOS. I have

ASUS M5A97 with AMD 4 core FX4300

It was driving me nuts because the install would appear to run OK yet it would never boot. Here is what I found and it looks like a bug in enumerating UEFI BIOS.

If I let the install create partitions I would see it try to install onto the audio device! (You read that right) What I see is

format device mapper volume /dev/mapper/isw_cfdjdifcbj_Audio-part5 (398 MB) for /boot with ext4

and similar for the other partitions. It make no difference if I disable the onboard audio or not. This is what the install is doing. If I go and delete all the partitions and recreate them on the only hard drive then it works fine. I also notice that the drive enumeration is really flaky as it sees the audio device as a disk and it sees the only hard disk twice, once as standard sata drive and again as a RAID drive even though there is no RAID controller or RAID option present. I went through the BIOS and disabled as much as I could but the error always occurs. IN a nutshell all automatic installations will fail. A quick note and that was that I wondered if it was the platform but WIN8 and Server 2012 installed without a hitch. I guess my only question now is if I got the right partition sizes. I don’t know much about Linux partitions but what I created is as follows

400MB /boot
40GB /
300GB /home
and 20 GB for swap

Do these look right and if not what should I adjust them to. Any advice is appreciated.

#2

And what it would do instead? Please explain what happens when you reboot after installation, step by step. Did you have any errors during installation? Do you have any errors when you try to boot after installation? Do you get bootloader menu? Can you select kernel? Does kernel load? Etc etc etc.

Your device is simply Intel fake RAID volume, which someone called “Audio” in the past. It has nothing to do with audio devices.

#3

You’re missing the ESP partition. UEFI bios needs the first partition to be a 200M or larger fat32 formatted partition. If openSUSE installed at all, it probably did so in a mbr mode, although, I haven’t tried installing a distro on my UEFI motherboard in legacy mbr mode, so, no first hand knowledge of what you’re seeing.

I have an ASUS Sabertooth 990FX mother board, so our UEFI bios’ have similar functionality. I’m also running an FX8150, so, our setup is very similar.

Here’s my fdisk -l output showing my partitions:
1 2048 401407 195M EFI System EFI System Partition
2 401408 2498559 1G Microsoft basic
3 2498560 736501759 350G Microsoft basic
4 736501760 820387839 40G Microsoft basic
5 820387840 853942271 16G Linux swap

Partition 1 is the ESP formatted fat32 (or was it fat16 on this machine, I can’t remember, both work).
Parttion 2 is my /boot partition (ext3)
Partition 3 is /home (ext4)
Partition 4 is / (root) (ext4)
Partition 5 is swap (I have 16G of memory, so, I like a large swap, even though it may never be needed).

Why fdisk is now showing my ext4 partitions as Microsoft basic, I have no idea. They used to read Linux. No Microsoft product has ever touched this machine.

I’ll have to say, the openSUSE installer worked very well to set up my UEFI install. The tricky part was making sure I had the correct partitions.

Edit: Here’s my parted output, it shows the partitions a little better:

Number Start End Size File system Name Flags
1 1049kB 206MB 204MB fat16 EFI System Partition boot
2 206MB 1279MB 1074MB ext3
3 1279MB 377GB 376GB ext4
4 377GB 420GB 42.9GB ext4
5 420GB 437GB 17.2GB linux-swap(v1)

I did use fat16 for the ESP, and ext3 for /boot. That was the requirements for Fedora 17, which was released about a year and a half ago, and, was using legacy grub for its UEFI installs. If I was setting up a new machine, I’d use ext4 for all Linux partitions, and, fat32 for the ESP.

#4

I have tried install several times and it never succeeds. This was a brand new virgin MB, virgin processor and virgin HD. For some reason the installer goes nuts and keeps trying to install onto this phantom “audio” drive. I am booting off a USB that I have installed a non UEFI machine from. There is no legacy option in the bIOS. I even checked the MD5 checksum and it is good. I noticed that during the default install nothing is being written to the hard drive even though it says copying files and packages. So what I did today was to call ASUS directly. They didn’t want to talk to me so I said then I would just get a RMA and return the product. Here is exactly what I was told. “Linux is installed at your own risk. It is unsupported” He said there are many known Linux UEFI issues without elaborating. we ran through the settings and that was that. During our conversation he mentioned ASUS get hundreds of cases about Linux not installing on UEFI. Still no proper Linux installation on my end. I really wish I didn’t have to use MS products but an OS that wont install on brand new mainstream HW is a huge oversight somewhere. I don’t mind tinkering but 99% of end users would have packed it in already and they need an OS so guess where they go? The death star MS!

#5

Hi
Grab the 13.1 Rescue CD and boot from that it’s UEFI/secure boot ready and check the drive is set as a gpt device (via gdisk) it probably isn’t… I run the Rescue one from a USB device, installed via imagewriter.

#6

Assuming you don’t have two drives RAIDED you may have the BIOS/UEFI FAKE RAID turned on go into the BIOS/UEFI and be sure it is turned off

#7

On 2014-01-11 05:46, exponent wrote:

> So what I did today was to call ASUS directly. They
> didn’t want to talk to me so I said then I would just get a RMA and
> return the product.

I would do that ASAP. I never buy ASUS. Not even for a Windows machine.

> Here is exactly what I was told. “Linux is installed
> at your own risk. It is unsupported” He said there are many known Linux
> UEFI issues without elaborating. we ran through the settings and that
> was that. During our conversation he mentioned ASUS get hundreds of
> cases about Linux not installing on UEFI.

Their fault.

> Still no proper Linux
> installation on my end. I really wish I didn’t have to use MS products
> but an OS that wont install on brand new mainstream HW is a huge
> oversight somewhere.

Yes, an ASUS intentional oversight. They do not want you to install Linux.

–
Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 12.3 x86_64 “Dartmouth” at Telcontar)