@spiritfly:
I never realized that the nanoBSD is a different version. I thought that guide is taking me to the same mirror links for the same image. Oh well..
I've already installed it to my USB flash disk using another USB flash drive to put the installation on it. Then booted from it and chose to install on the first (empty flash disk) and it installed correctly.
I would caution you that the nano version has optimizations for flash that will preserve the life of the USB stick. Otherwise you might find it dying in less than a year since the standard version will write to it as though it were a hard disk.
https://www.pfsense.org/about-pfsense/versions.html
Flash memory can only handle a limited number of writes, so the embedded version runs read only from flash, with read/write file systems as RAM disks.
Switching versions is actually quite painless. Save your configuration to your computer from Diagnostics: Backup/restore: Download Configuration, install the nano version to the USB stick, then upload your configuration back to it. Another alternative is that you can manually configure the full version to behave mostly like the nano version.
@spiritfly:
One question about this though. I've noticed that when booting from the USB flash when it is connected on some of the USB ports on the back of my PC, an error showed up just before pfSense was supposed to boot and the following command line came up: db>
If I take and connect the same USB thumb on the front it runs perfectly. Weird.. I think all USB ports are USB 2.0 front and back. The MB is Asus M2N-MX if it means anything.
My guess would be that the drive numbers are changed when you move it to a different port. The simplest solution is to have it in it's final port when it's installed although you can reconfigure if moving is necessary.