@eirikz: What kind of system is this ? Almost seems like a old system with IDE and custom values on the drivesize in BIOS. I've also encountered this issue on my Western Digital 160GB 1600AAJS Sata 2 as well as a Seagate Barracuda 80GB drive.  This seems to occur on some manufacturer short-stroked drives for some reason. i.e.  It is cheaper for the manufacturer to produce only 250GB platters wholesale at the time and use only 160GB of the platter when producing the 160GB model rather than to start a 2nd production line just for 160GB platters. This is a real pity because the 1600AAJS is a single platter drive that has low power consumption, high speeds and even faster access times (due to short-stroking).  It's an inexpensive drive that rivals the 10K rpm drives for OS and apps load times.

It's kind of an odd combination that is required to trigger the problem, and as far as I know you're only the third person to report the issue, all within a couple weeks of each other, even though the problem has existed for years. :-) Funny how that happens. I'll add a reference to this thread in the ticket. Any additional information you have about that setup would be helpful as well.

Sorry, I wrong explained myself. I have an embedded system with Compact Flash, and I would install the full version of pfSense to use packages like Ntop. The system is an Openvox system with 1 GHz processor and 1 GHz of RAM…

Your running pfsense in VMware correct? It's just a virtual network and not a VLAN. You need to change the network type to bridged so that it gets its own IP.

Press tab to enter bios and disable console redirection

There's no issue.  The embedded (NanoBSD) variants of pfsense do not use the VGA/ KB for console access.  Once loaded, it uses the first serial port with settings of 9600/8/N/1 for console access. You will need another machine/ laptop with a terminal client (I recommend Putty for Windows) and a serial port.  Connect this to the pfsense rig with a Null modem cable and you should see the pfsense console inside of the terminal software.  Remember to set the software to 9600/8/N/1 though. Also, if your server supports redirection of VGA to serial, you will need to disable this feature in BIOS or at least set it so that redirection is disabled after BIOS.

It's a feature of the RS-232 serial connector, if both ends have the exact same connector and pin configuration the wires  have to switched around to get it to work.

@submicron: http://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Boot_Troubleshooting Tried that didn't work at all. But I installed pfsense on a usb-stick which is connected as a external hard drive… And guess what I can boot from the usb stick...

I've got a similar problem - except it's a 120GB disk that I've got lying around (my 2GB flash card has finally bitten the bullet after about 6 years!) The error I keep getting on installation attempts is: ,-<<< Executing '/sbin/fdisk -v -f /tmp/format.fdisk ad1' | ******* Working on device /dev/ad1 ******* | fdisk: WARNING line 1: number of cylinders (59130) may be out-of-range | (must be within 1-1024 for normal BIOS operation, unless the entire disl | is dedicated to FreeBSD) | fdisk: ERROR line 1: number of sectors must be within (1-63) '->>> Exit status: 1 I do want the entire disk available to FreeBSD (specifically Squid) if possible, but even going through the custom setup and using the suggested settings that produce a partition size of 7.16GB, it still fails on the next step. Any ideas?

Yeah that looks like a better boot, but not ideal. I know when the ALIX units hit that (#####) it means they needed a more up-to-date BIOS to boot the new images. Not sure if you'll be able to make that work on that old of a board or not. You might have to try this (but beware of the warnings) http://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/NanoBSD_on_WRAP

dreamslacker, you are a champ. OK, I will install pfsense again to try it out. Cheers.

@gtivey: I might be wrong, but it seems that you cannot just dd the image in linux any longer…. Linux has absolutely no idea how to handle the FreeBSD glabels. Nor does it need to, you're simply dumping a disk image to disk. Though your Linux distro is apparently doing something it shouldn't be when simply running dd, and hosing the disk in the process. Which distro are you running?

Just for anyone searching for this topic in the future: Some CF cards flat out have issues.  If you experience issues try a different card and or CF writer.

@kc8apf: No, they are inconsistent.  As I said above, the initial command given to run is correct, but the command in the example output is wrong.  If you follow the example output, you end up with an non-bootable card. Ah yeah, fixed.

Yes I'm wanting to use pfsense just for wireless but it will be our own employees using our wireless(some guests who only need Internet) and they will need access to the local network. I am wanting to use pfsense mainly for the captive portal so that we can have them authenticate through radius to IAS on a server 2003 box to discourage them from giving out the wireless password for the employee network if we had a two ssid system (employee and guest). We do not want to do that, we would like to have it be one ssid and let pfsense decide where the traffic is routed. I am aware of the security concerns with this setup but this is one of the only free ways that I have seen to accomplish this. Is this possible with pfsense through firewall rules? I've had it set up before to where it was working sort of, users would get on the wireless on vlan 2, not be able to get Internet,but once they authenticated they could get Internet, bit they could not see the local network. My setup was exactly like my drawing above.

@tnine: If you write to a DOM, do you use the live CD or the embedded version? Either, depending on what version you want to run.