OPNSense,  Security

Resolve OPNSense stuck at booting

August 4, 2020 /

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.

OPNSense stuck at booting

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.

  1. Reboot your machine if you get stuck at the Booting step when booting from your installation media.
  2. Press 3 when you see the boot menu as per below.boot screen
  3. Type set kern.vty=sc and then press enter.
  4. Type boot and press enter to continue booting.
  5. If you need to install OPNSense then continue with the installation steps.
  6. After installation you need to reboot and run steps 2 to 4 again if you are still getting stuck at the Booting screen.
  7. Now login with the user root and the password you set when installing OPNSense.
  8. Type 8 to get to the shell.
  9. 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.
  10. Type cd /boot
  11. Type vi loader.conf.local and press enter.
  12. vi will open. Hit the I key to insert text. Type kern.vty=sc and then press the escape key.
  13. To save the file type :wq!
  14. Check if the line was saved in the loader.conf.local file by typing cat loader.conf.local and pressing enter.
  15. Reboot the server if you see the text you added printed on the screen.
  16. You should not be stuck at Booting anymore.

8 Comments

  • Pedro Serrano

    April 8, 2023 at 1:34 pm Reply

    The following unexpected situation resulted after restoring “ALL” sections from a previous OPNsense backup. The serialusb 1 /serialusb line item was inserted into /conf/config.xml. This was causing the system to look like it was hung after booting up, right before showing the login: prompt. The system was still responding to ping, so it wasn’t really hung, but was unresponsive and console access was lost.

    Removing the serialusb 1/serialusb line from /conf/config.xml fixed the trouble. Console access was regained, problem fixed.

    p.s. Apologize for the multiple postings. Attempts to write the serialusb 1 /serialusb xml line properly, with the enclosing less than and greater than symbols, failed. Somehow the web page is removing everything between these brackets, leaving only the number “1”, which makes no sense.

  • Josh

    June 4, 2021 at 9:03 pm Reply

    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!

  • Derek Armstrong

    March 15, 2021 at 5:15 pm Reply

    When editing loader.conf.local, you need to remove the “set” portion of the config line for it to take effect.

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