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.