Minisforum

Minisforum MS-A2 Disable TPM

Minisforum MS-A2 Disable TPM

The Minisforum MS-A2 is an awesome system to use in a home lab. It does have one downside, and that is that even though it has a TPM (Trusted Platform Module) 2.0 chip, it is a TPM 2.0 CRB (Command-Response buffer) chip, which is likely useful for a lot of use cases. However, it is not compatible with VMware ESXi. VMware ESXi requires a TPM 2.0 FIFO (First-In-First-Out) chip. Fortunately, you can disable the TPM.

In this post, I will show you step-by-step how to disable the TPM on a Minisforum MS-A2.

The Process

  • Get into BIOS by pressing the Del key.
  • Select Setup.
  • Select the Advanced menu.
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Minisforum MS-A2 BIOS Options

Minisforum MS-A2 BIOS Options

Recently, I acquired a Minisforum MS-A2 system and have been experimenting with it in my home lab. Something that’s been bothering me is the lack of documentation about all the different BIOS menus. I’ve also found myself forgetting which BIOS menu I saw which option. To address my issue, I decided to document all the BIOS options.

The BIOS that the Minisforum MS-A2 runs is AMI (American Megatrends International). My MS-A2 is the AMD Ryzen 9 9955HX version. The BIOS version I am running is 1.02.

You can download BIOS updates from Minisforum here.

In this post, I will share my documentation of each BIOS option I found on the Minisforum MS-A2.

Booting

When the Minisforum boots, you see the Minisforum splash screen.

Minisforum boot splash screen.

When the Minisforum is booting, you can press F7 to access the boot menu or press Del to enter the BIOS.

F7 Boot Menu Screen

Delete Menu Screen

When you press Delete, you are presented with an initial menu that allows you to select several options, including Setup, Boot, UEFI Shell, Boot Options, and BBS Menu.

  • Setup will take you into the BIOS.
  • Boot will boot the system normally
  • UEFI Shell tries to load shell.efi from any of the attached devices.
  • Boot Options will bring up a menu to select a boot device.
  • BBS Menu (BIOS Boot Spec) will also display a menu to select a boot device.

BIOS Setup

The BIOS Setup has the following menus.

Main

  • For System Date, you can enter the date.
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