Hey, Im not trying to revive an old thread but I thought I would share on my success. After spending about 12-14 hours trying to get my old toshiba 3505 laptop to boot to the pfsense image I finally had some luck. The laptop doesn't have a cd-rom drive or support usb cdrom drives or boot from usb. but it does support usb floppy drives. So if any of you find your self in this situation here is what I did. Keep in mind this was all done in Windows 7. Use the  PLoP bootmanager found here http://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager.html#runflp create the floopy image. This allows your computer to boot to a mini bootmanager that has usb drivers and supports usb booting if your computer doesn't. Then use flashnul to write the image that Dan made and clyss linked http://rapidshare.com/files/295724278/pfSense-1.2.3-RC1-LiveFlash-Installer.img.bz2 The flashnul program worked while UNetbootin and PhysDiskWrite did not. flashnul found here http://shounen.ru/soft/flashnul/ or the English translated version here http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fshounen.ru%2Fsoft%2Fflashnul%2F&hl=en&ie=UTF8&sl=ru&tl=en Start the command prompt as an administrator (type cmd in the start menu search then when the icon appears right click and run as administrator) Go to the directory where you extracted flashnul flashnul -p      this allows you to see your drives example D:\flashnuldir>flashnul -p Avaible physical drives: 0      size = 1000204886016 (931 Gb) 1      size = 293462867968 (273 Gb) 2      size = -1 ( -not avaible- ) 3      size = -1 ( -not avaible- ) 4      size = 2031091712 (1937 Mb) Avaible logical disks: A:\ C:\ D:\ E:\ F:\ G:\ H:\ I:\ J:\ Press ENTER to exit. Next enter the the parameters of the drive letter and where the image is at flashnul [drive letter] -L [path to .img] Ex. flashnul I: -L d:\flashnuldir\pfsense.img my Example D:\flashnuldir>flashnul I: -L d:\flashnuldir\pfSense-1.2.3-RC1-LiveFlash-Installer.img GetFreeDiskSpaceEx() failed: Access is denied. Disk I: (UNC name: \\.\I:) ------------------------------------------------------------[Drive geometry]-- Cylinders/heads/sectors  = 246/255/63 Bytes per sector        = 512 CHS size                = 2023418880 (1929 Mb) ---------------------------------------------------------------[Device size]-- Device size              = 2031091712 (1937 Mb) delta to near power of 2 = 116391936 (111 Mb), 5% -----------------------------------------------[Adapter & Device properties]-- Bus type                = (7) USB Removable device        = Yes Command Queue            = Unsupported Device vendor            = Kingston Device name              = DataTraveler 2.0 Revision                = PMAP Device serial            = ▼ --------------------------------------------------------------[Hotplug info]-- Device hotplug          = Yes Media hotplug            = No         Selected operation:      load file content         Selected drive:          I:, 2031091712b (1937 Mb)         THIS OPERATION IS DESTRUCTIVE!!!         Type 'yes' to confirm operation. All other text will stop it.         Really destroy data on drive I:?  : make sure that's your flash drive you want! and enter "yes" then there will be some progress stats and then it will say if there were any errors if not than it should be good to go! Hopefully this is useful to anyone in the future. I'm just hoping that my netgear gigabit PCMCIA nic is supported now. Thanks again for the useful information above my post and Dan for the image.

Thanks Bob, I'll give it a try, downloading as I type. Is there any 'easy' way to transfer this iso to a usb stick? I've been looking for that before but did not find a clean solution. Thanks a lot! Erwin

For anyone interested in whats going on here: I set FW1 WAN to get ip by dhcp and set the range for the dhcp server on fw2 to only fw1's wan ip addy and now its fine At least if someone else starts asking about chaining firewalls now you can link them to this thread =p

Great news thank you for your answers.. Thanks "rhy7s", i dunno this repository and will download the latest one, and thanks "Perry" the post of "jimp" achieved to convince me, so i will go with 1.2.3 !

Thanks for your hint!

Well I can describe how I did it  :) I set up af TFTP server on a Debian machine and then booted the Soekris (5501) from that machines NIC. There are many guides on the net describing how to setup a TFTP server. Iam not sure this is the easiest way but it worked perfectly for me. I guess the easiest thing is to mount the harddrive in another machine, install PfSense on it and then put it back in the Soekris.

fitted new cf card and it just booted straight up :)

@GruensFroeschli: I'm confused. Is the pfSense OPT IP 192.168.118.1 or 192.168.118.100 ? Or has the server this IP? You wrote contradicting things. Thanks for replying. The Problem is solved. After an reinstallation I was able to add another l-Adapter (le0,le1,le2). In my old installation (VMWARE Download from pfsense.com) the Name of the adapter was em0 Now I'm happy  ;D

Problem solved, now everything works like a champ. Thanks to all that helped.

You can't (yet, that's been added in 2.0) short of maintaining aliases yourself.

I have what sounds like the same Kingston CF, and using the 4 GB image works perfectly. Not to mention about 40 other various CF cards. The looping fsck is bad, that would indicate file system corruption. I've only seen that on images where the build process went awry, that hasn't happened for months though.

@pfsense_fan009: Is it normal the writing to a CF could take more then 20 minutes? Depends on how fast your CF is and how fast your writer is. With an old USB 1.1 writer it can take a lot longer than that. With a good USB 2.0 writer and a decently fast CF, 10 minutes or so is about what it takes for 2 GB.

The disk usage will never grow on embedded (unless you start making modifications outside the web interface). Things like logs are all strictly in RAM. It'll sit there at whatever it's at now forever. So you don't need to upgrade thinking you're running out of space, you won't. Getting on the nanobsd embedded (1.2.3-RC3) is preferable so you have the current supported, upgradeable embedded. But there is no impending issue because you're low on space (you were to begin with, that hasn't changed).

@dotdash: b) The embedded kernel output to serial by default, it is no longer available as an option in 1.2.3rcX. I just saw from another thread, that strangely, the embedded kernel can be installed from the easy install, but not from the custom install. I missed that, as I haven't tried an easy install in some time. Perhaps it will get added back to the custom install.

different subnets is a must, nothing silly.

I don't recall the "7 option pfSense menu". What does that look like? (It would probably be sufficient to show a couple of the options.) Since your system doesn't have a video interface (and presumably no video hardware) its probably best to use the embedded kernel to avoid invoking a driver that thinks there is a VGA device in the system. If I recall correctly, the default settings on the pfSense serial port are 8bits, no parity, 9600bps so you would probably want to change the BIOS settings to the same values so there is a "seamless" transition from BIOS control of the serial port to FreeBSD control of the serial port.  I would expect that if you are using the embedded kernel you wouldn't need to invoke BIOS redirection because the booted boot loader and kernel shouldn't be doing any video output of its startup progress.  (But I've never used an embedded kernel so I have no personal experience of this.)

Thanks, it was the firewall rule that was missing.  I thought when Opt1 was bridged to the LAN it would automatically pass all the protofcols/etc.  Should have read further.  That part was in the documentation I was reading I just didn't get that far into it… premature configuration.   :-[  Once I did that it started working great. I appreciate the specific rule for DHCP above, for now I'm opening all the ports "any" for the Opt1 / wifi interface as I want the wireless clients to be able to access other devices on the LAN without restriction. D'oh on the dual radios, I wrongly thought I could use an A/B/G card to operate on all bands, but I should have known that wasn't the case.  I understand why, just didn't really research that part or think it through.  Not a big deal as I'm just using it for home as a test. All in all seems to be working well. /Posting from a Wireless client.

Well help is always appreciated, but if people would search and use the existing documentation there would be less time wasted on duplicated efforts and reinventing the wheel. I could understand if there were some deficiency in the existing instructions, or if they were out of date. However, in this case, if he had looked up the issue on the Documentation Wiki, he wouldn't have needed to do all the research, writing, and so on. It's already been taken care of and kept up-to-date. Also, we try to discourage people from downloading images from unofficial or non-developer sites for security and integrity reasons.