Package: debian-installer Severity: important Tags: d-i patch This is simply a manufacturing defect on 990FX boards made by ASUS. I can confirm at least on the Crosshair V that ASUS refuses to fix the problem. UEFI is technically supported and windows 8+ uses it as these are 64-bit boards. HOWEVER, along comes a penguin and all goes to hell. EVERY SINGLE LINUX I try is forced to use MSDOS/MBR setup instead of UEFI/GPT. It doesnt matter if the install succeeds or boots. One change after install to the boot sequence and the hard disk is no longer bootable.This is caused by the BIOS forcing a seek to partition 4/5 of the drive where the bootloader is not.Using USB media with EFI files will not work either, the partition is in the wrong place for the BIOS to boot from it. This should never be. EFI files should boot from the FIRST partition of ANY device. I believe INTEL made this specification.
The ONLY way this system will work is to install (or force install) into MSDOS/MBR mode, where partition 4/5 are therefore bootable. This can be accomplished in two ways: 1) install and intentionally cause the drive to fail to boot, then reinsert install media and try again. 2) wipe the disk, install another i386 version of linux and say no to UEFI mode. DO NOT FORCE it. The installer will not force UEFI by itself during partitioning. 3) throw the x64 install media away and use the i386 one instead. As I said, this is a 64bit system, so really no point in doing #3. This bug is not debian specific.Fedora flip flops between the two modes and forces a system wide format on each install.It took awhile to figure out the problem. A BIOS update may fix this if ASUS could be bothered to produce one. -- System Information: Debian Release: stretch/sid APT prefers testing APT policy: (500, 'testing') Architecture: amd64 (x86_64) Foreign Architectures: i386 Kernel: Linux 4.0.0-2-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores) Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
