virtualbox.org

Host - Win 10 64x
VBox – 6.1.26
After starting the installation I go straight to the EFI shell. And that's where the whole setup ends. How do I proceed with the installation?

I understand that you can hit Esc and the shell will go to a boot menu where the install media might be started.

There is no response to Esc. If I enter exit I get to the uefi bios. There are two options there Continue and Reset. Choosing any of them brings me back to the same state I started with.

Try rebooting and hitting Esc before you get to the shell.

Tried it - pressed Esc several times right after pressing Start. I'm hitting the shell again.

Hmm, that's too bad. I don't know what else to do, will have to wait for a forum guru to come along.

Both pressing Esc very early and entering exit in the (U)EFI Shell usually gets you into the (U)EFI BIOS, and the menu should then show Select Language, Device Manager, Boot Manager and Boot Maintenance Manager right above Continue and Reset.

Please reproduce the issue and post a zipped VBox.log file.

My log file.

However, I saved the snapshot with the broken state and started the installation without uefi for now. Therefore the file may also contain data from this installation.

The FreeBSD_64x-2021-09-26-20-19-48.log file doesn't indicate any problems to me. I can see that you switched from the (U)EFI Shell to the (U)EFI BIOS after ~20 seconds, and back again after ~2 minutes.

I just switched to the no uefi option to, do the install. So I made a new VM with UEFI to display the situation. Same effect. Here's the new Log file.

I'm not sure if I really understand what you're trying to do. Can you perhaps describe it in more detail?

Additionally, your host's CPU is quite old and doesn't have features like EPT, which are nowadays expected for efficient hardware virtualization. Perhaps there is some incompatibility between (U)EFI BIOS and the CPU capabilities.

Unfortunately, no other details are available. After starting the VM, I am immediately taken to the EFI shell prompt and that's where it ends.

My computer is really old and I'm just trying to learn freebsd, so I guess I should just put it off until I upgrade and go back to the no uefi option.

GVitaliy63 wrote:My computer is really old ... put it off until I upgrade

Your physical computer and the Virtualbox 'hardware' are completely separate entities, except for the physical CPU.

If you have been setting the VM to EFI because your computer is EFI, you don't have to. Legacy BIOS VMs on EFI host or EFI VMs on Legacy BIOS host are completely compatible.

FWIW pfSense is a FreeBSD OS and does not require EFI. Are you sure that your FreeBSD requires EFI? If it does not, you can simplify learning FreeBSD by switching to Legacy BIOS.