I have a newish Asus motherboard (Asus PRIME A520M-A II) and I’ve been having some trouble installing IncusOS (first time doing so). The issues is that I can’t even start the installation. After a lot of trouble to finally get the USB drive visible in the BIOS, I now can’t load the secure boot keys.
When I try to load new keys, I get a message stating “No Valid File System Available”.
Has anyone solved this issue before?
Hmm, you used the USB image rather than ISO, right?
Used the iso. I still couldn’t figure it out. I’ll try to search for the keys and format a usb drive just with the keys.
Read on an ASUS manual it has to be “formatted as a UEFI variable structure with time-based authenticated variable.”
Have no clue what this means, but I’ll try to figure it out.
You’ll definitely want to use the USB image so that it’s 512 bytes aligned which is what your motherboard is likely expecting. The ISO is 2048 bytes aligned as needed when written onto an actual media (CD/DVD).
Ahhh… so this is probably the issue. Just noticed there is a line about this in the docs. Will try it tomorrow and report here.
Progress report to help out anyone with similar issues.
After fixing my mistake on selecting the correct image, I was able to start IncusOS and load the keys. Had issues as I configured installation with Secure Boot and TPM 2.0, but IncusOS reported Secure Boot was turned off. This is probably the part which I could help others the most, as BIOS configuration is hard to figure out and badly documented.
The Asus BIOS manual is mostly useless. I don’t remember all the BIOS changes I had to do, but I know I had to configure the TPM, the CSM (compatibility support module) and Secure Boot. For the TPM, I don’t remember exactly how I changed it, but I was able to figure it out with the local description and searching through everything.
For CSM, I had to search online on how to have drives and USB recognized. From many changes, what I think solved it was on Boot > CSM and then setting Launch CSM to enabled and Boot Device Control to UEFI and Legacy OPROM.
The trickiest part is for Secure Boot. First of all, there is no option to enable or disable secure boot. This is controlled by a collection of other configuration keys. Start from Boot > Secure Boot.
Now this is the counter intuitive part. On OS Type, you have the options of Other OS and Windows UEFI Mode. Secure Boot is only enabled if you set the OS Type to Windows UEFI Mode. Found this information on the Asus support page where they have screen shots of the BIOS and a table of the Secure Boot states. Clearing the keys moves it into Setup mode. IncusOS could install the keys correctly on this state and they could be manually loaded as well.
After sorting out the BIOS configuration issues, the installation was smooth. I would still like to make some comments on troubles I had. I don’t find these proposed changes as necessary at all and are mostly opinion based, but I would still like to report them.
I found the documentation to be very robust already. But I would still change some details.
I made a mistake on selecting the install media. For this, I checked the documentation a few times trying to see what could have led me off and wanted to report.
On the Image Customizer page, Image type contains ISO and USB options. Note that ISO is a file format while USB is a medium for installation. Since the byte alignment makes a huge difference on the media being recognised, options should be of the same type and probably lean towards the medium of installation. Furthermore, the default is selected to ISO and it is a file format which is usually not an issue to install through USB, so I think some improvements could be made here.
I would change ISO to Virtual and also delete the trailing closing parenthesis. I’m probably biased on the default value, but USB could be considered as a better option. It would probably be nice to add a comment that those options have different byte alignments and might be a reason for the media not to be recognised. Preferably a short description without too much detail.
On the Getting an image page, it starts with
ISO and raw images are distributed via the Linux Containers CDN.
This together with the ISO and USB options, and the fact that most installation media is distributed through ISO format, led me to believe it was the preferable option. Would change to
Images are distributed via the Linux Containers CDN.
The comment of not using the iso format for usb is only inside the Flasher tool section, in which it states
When run, you will first be prompted for the image format you want to use, either
iso(default) or animg(raw) disk image. Note that the ISO isn’t a hybrid image; if you want to boot from a USB stick you should choose theimgdisk image format.
Although I saw this comment yesterday after @stgraber pointed out the difference in file formats, only today I noticed it is in another section.
Might be best to have a common section in which this is mentioned.
We used to specify the format instead (ISO and RAW) but that was causing even more confusion. USB or CD-ROM would still be confusing because most CD-ROM drives are USB these days. We’ve generally tried to keep the wording lined up with what’s exposed by production servers as those are the main install target for Incus, on those, it’s preferable to use the ISO image and have that attached to the virtual media which usually is a virtual CD-ROM drive (on a virtual USB bus).
Also covers the media selection at the top.