Intermittent EFI boot issue?

[Glen Barber]

On Sun, May 29, 2016 at 11:05:01PM -0400, Jason Hunt wrote:
> Intermittently after building world/kernel and installing kernel, upon
> reboot I sometimes get stuck at:
> 
> >> FreeBSD EFI boot block
>    Loader path: /boot/loader.efi
> 
>    Initializing modules: ZFS UFS
>    Probing 35 block devices ... done
>     ZFS found the following pools: zroot
>     UFS found no partitions
> Consoles: EFI console
> 
> And that's it.
> 
> Often times it's fixed by rebooting, but sometimes it takes numerous
> attempts.  Patience and cold boot vs warm boot doesn't make a difference
> and unfortunately there doesn't seem to be any pattern as to how it fixes
> itself.  Eventually the full boot screen appears and I can get in to single
> user mode to continue installing world.
> 
> I've only been following current for a couple of months, so I can't say if
> this is a new problem, but it's happened most (but not every) times I've
> rebuilt the system.  Normal day-to-day rebooting doesn't give me any
> issues; only when rebuilding.
> 
> Do I potentially have a buggy EFI firmware (motherboard is an ASUS P8B75-M
> with latest firmware), or could it be a FreeBSD issue?  I'm not even sure
> how to try diagnosing this or what information would be helpful?
> 
> Any suggestions are appreciated.
> 

I've heard of an issue I've hit only a few times, without being able to 
reproduce it reliably.

When the machine passes POST, could you hold down the spacebar (or other
non-character key)?

Ideally, it will drop you to the loader prompt and/or ask you what you
want to do.  Typing 'boot' and hitting '[enter]', if the working theory
is correct, should work.

If not, we have more than one issue here.

Thanks.

Glen

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