"Secure Boot" motherboards (to avoid)?

[Bob Willcox]

On Mon, May 12, 2014 at 10:29:11AM -0600, Warren Block wrote:
> On Sat, 10 May 2014, Ronald F. Guilmette wrote:
> 
> >
> > Please forgive what may perhaps be an FAQ, answered somewhere (but noplace
> > that I can find, apparently).
> >
> > I'll be buying a new motherboard soon to replace the aging 6.5 year old
> > Gigabyte motherboard in my #2 "desktop" system.
> >
> > For whatever new motherboard I buy, do I need to be on the lookout
> > for the possibility that it may incorporate some form of non-easily-
> > disablable UEFI/SecureBoot firmware that will prevent me from booting
> > anything other than Windoze?  Or is this generally a non-issue for
> > stand-alone (sold-alone) consumer motherboards?
> 
> The ability to disable SecureBoot is supposed to be part of the UEFI 
> spec.  Just for reference, I recently set up a UEFI Gigabyte H87-D3H for 
> legacy booting.  It works fine.

I've been trying to get a brand new ASUS AM1I-A motherboard to boot FreeBSD
9.3 RC3 for awhile now. It installs just fine but then won't boot. It either
silently drops back into BIOS, or on my most recent attempt throws up a I/O
error message and tells me to hit Ctl-Alt-Del. As far as I can tell, Secure
Boot is disabled in BIOS, but I'm not sure I trust what it is telling me.

BTW, as a test I was able to successfully install Windows 7 on the system and
it did boot.

I'm beginning to think I need to return the mother board.

Bob

-- 
Bob Willcox    | The technological revolution that gave us radio and sound
bob at immure.com | recording happened so long ago now that all of the true
Austin, TX     | innovators have retired or passed away to be replaced by
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