Resolve OPNSense stuck at booting
I’m busy building an OPNSense firewall for my home network and got stuck at a booting screen (below) before I could start the installation. I tried disabling UEFI, re-enabling it in the BIOS and a few other BIOS settings but could not resolve the issue from within the BIOS.
To resolve the issue and get to the installer I followed the forum post by benibilme from here on the OPNSense forums. The steps I followed to resolve the issue are below and the video that shows the steps at the end of this blog post.
- Reboot your machine if you get stuck at the Booting step when booting from your installation media.
- Press 3 when you see the boot menu as per below.
- Type set kern.vty=sc and then press enter.
- Type boot and press enter to continue booting.
- If you need to install OPNSense then continue with the installation steps.
- After installation you need to reboot and run steps 2 to 4 again if you are still getting stuck at the Booting screen.
- Now login with the user root and the password you set when installing OPNSense.
- Type 8 to get to the shell.
- Now you need to create a new file called loader.conf.local in the /boot directory and add the text you typed in step 3 to the file.
- Type cd /boot
- Type vi loader.conf.local and press enter.
- vi will open. Hit the I key to insert text. Type kern.vty=sc and then press the escape key.
- To save the file type :wq!
- Check if the line was saved in the loader.conf.local file by typing cat loader.conf.local and pressing enter.
- Reboot the server if you see the text you added printed on the screen.
- You should not be stuck at Booting anymore.
5 Comments
Oliver
Thank you for the instruction. Very helpful 🙂
Cheers
Oli
Roger
you save my day, thanks !
Josh
Thank you for posting this! It worked perfectly and I was able to get my OPNsense to finally boot. As Derek mentioned, on step 12 just enter “kern.vty=sc” without the “set” when creating the loader.conf.local. Thanks again!
Exchange Times .Net
Thanks Josh and Derek I will update that line.
Glad you came right!
Derek Armstrong
When editing loader.conf.local, you need to remove the “set” portion of the config line for it to take effect.