It probably isn't locked up there. At that point it switches over to displaying the pfSense startup console messages, but for some reason it cannot. It's possible there is something amiss with the console or terminal settings on the box at that point. By far the fastest and easiest way to recover is to reinstall and restore your configuration. If you don't have a backup, use the "rescue config.xml" option in the installer – multiple times if it fails the first try -- and you'll be back up in a few minutes. If you haven't yet registered your firewall, do so and/or login to https://portal.pfsense.org/ and you should have a link to the factory firmware for that unit. If your support expired, just grab the ADI install image from pfsense.org for 2.3.2 and do the same.

Make sure it's outside your pfsense DHCP range so you don't end up with a IP conflict.

Right. Someone modified the package repository files to include samba36. There is no such repository in the standard installation.

Thank you very much :)

@heper Changing the slots was the first thing I did, but no luck. The bios has the last version, updating the driver, I don't know how to do it. I read some posts, but I didn't find a good answer, compiling within the kernel, I'm afraid to do it.

For 2.3.0 and 2.3.1 we have been releasing smaller "patch" updates with security fixes between regular releases. You might have seen them as 2.3.1_5 for example. They were smaller updates and did not have much if any negative impact. NanoBSD dual boots as you suggest but it's been a source of problems over the years and is being phased out. It was more trouble than it was worth. We will have the capability for things like ZFS snapshots on 2.4 which may prove to be more worthwhile.

I got it to work now I selected the parallel port in general setting and display 2x20

I have gained a lot of business ventures.

Hi, forget to reply that is working. Thank so much for the help

+1 for Old GUI Old GUI had much better Themes/Skins to choose from.  8)

https://forum.pfsense.org/index.php?topic=116223.0 The update to pkg will get you back on track.

Well, more good news… I went through some boxes of gear and found an old PCI serial card, so I was able to install that in a server that's located next to the firewall and so now I finally have a reliable serial console on it. That makes life easier. :-) I ran the destructive badblocks check against the 4GB flash drive, twice. It came back clean both times. (So that's 8 cycles of write/read of various bit patterns to every block on the disk.) So I'm fairly sure the flash is ok. I wrote the 4GB 2.3.2 image to it, booted, connected to it and restored my config, and this time it booted up fine, it didn't become unresponsive and require several reboots to get it stable like it did when I first booted off of the 2GB flash earlier today. I wish I had had the serial console then so I could have seen what was going on. But in any event, it seems fine now with the original flash drive back in it. Also, I learned that the flashing "SOS" LED simply means there's an unread alert, so that was a red herring, not an indicator of a problem. So the bottom line is, there was nothing wrong with the disk; the pfSense automatic update process did indeed break my box rather badly. Thank you though Jim, for getting me thinking about this the right way. I sometimes forget that pfSense truly is an embedded system with a single XML config file, so it was dumb of me to be banging on it trying to fix it when I could simply re-flash and restore config. That got me back up and running. Still sucky that clicking an "update now!" button in a GUI can break your config though, even if it's easy to recover from. :-(

I think I've worked around the problem. I ran "pkg info" from the shell and noted all pfSense packages that remained "2.3.1_1". I ran "pkg install" for the "2.3.2" version of each of these versions, including "base", "config", and finally "pfSense". It uninstalled a dns related package and installed "dnsmasq" but now it reboots, identifies as 2.3.2, and seems to be functioning correctly now.

Hmm, that site is quite old and not used anymore. We relocated all that content to the doc wiki years ago. We'll get that cert updated but it's just a redirect to doc.pfsense.org. We have fixed the menu jump redirect to go there as well so it shouldn't be showing you the bad link if you try it again. Thanks for lettings us know!