Salix OS

I burned OPNsense to a USB to install it on an old HP 5750 I bought to make a hefty router for the house. Unfortunately, OPNsense uses EFI and the old HP uses BIOS. The USB works just fine on this laptop, so I know the image is good. And I know the HP can boot from USB since I ran a LiveUSB on it and installed another distro via USB. I'm hoping somebody here can tell me if it's possible to change the USB to an MBR so I can get it installed on the box.

Did you dd the image as per the instructions? Which image did you use?

Does the BIOS see the usb stick at all? Can you pick it as a boot device?

If all else fails, find a CD and burn the CDROM image. I'd be surprised if it doesn't boot that.

I think I've diagnosed the problem. The image uses EFI and the target computer uses BIOS. I'm going to after work and see if there's a BIOS-compatible image I can use.

I downloaded OPNsense-16.7-OpenSSL-vga-amd64.img.bz2, which is the file for a usb stick, extracted it, flashed the image to a usb stick using dd and was able to boot both in UEFI and bios mode. My laptop is uefi enabled and is set in CMS mode, so it can boot both uefi and bios mode. So OPNsense-16.7-OpenSSL-vga-amd64.img.bz2 is the correct image to download.

That's the image I used, I believe. I'll check again when I get home. So what else might be the problem?

Just to clearly lay out the details;
1) The image is good- it boots on my laptop with no trouble.
2) The box can boot from USB- I've now installed two other distros with the same stick in the same port.
3) BIOS acknowledges the stick- it shows the name and available space.

But it will not boot OPNsense from that stick.

It looks like the image may have two bootloaders on it. Is it possible BIOS is reading the wrong partition?

I have inquired about this on the OPNsense forum, but nobody has responded yet.

Is your "old HP5750" computer 32 or 64 bit?

64-bit.

I just upgraded it to 4 Gb of RAM and a 3 Ghz Athlon 64 X2 processor. According to the HP site it has the latest available BIOS also. A bit overkill for a home router/firewall. But a nice way to keep an outdated machine alive a while longer.