Answering myself: solved booting via LiveCD. It should be some problem with the USB booting routines, maybe due to a rather old machine : http://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/775Dual-915GL/

You should be able to do that upgrade without any particular issues. You should definitely be able to do it if you use a freshly flashed CF card. You should use the largest image that will fit on your card. Some 4GB cards are actually smaller and won't take the 4G image. If it writes to the card without error though you should be good. Did you try running 2.2.X without restoring your previous config for any length of time? The biggest issue with those older ALIX boards is that they only have 256MB of RAM which is restrictive. I suspect that you have some packages loaded that are exhausting the memory. The system logs should show that though or the console output if you have the serial console hooked up. What USB device are you using there? It's possible something in the FreeBSD 10 drivers is having an issue with it. Logs should also reveal that. Steve

All the years I've been using pfSense and I never knew that was there! I was instead creating them via an authorized key file transfer at the command line. I performed an upgrade using this methodology and it worked perfectly. Thank you! P.S. Chris, just a heads up… This is part of a monitoring project for pfSense that I will eventually be releasing. ;-) Good karma!

@kamyflex: EDIT : this shall and must be included in the installation guide. What? I'd suggest you try it again and don't look away from the screen. There are two menus, the initial one when you boot single mode, and the later one. The menu comes up and after 10 seconds, it boots into live CD mode. You have to hit 'I' before the timer runs out. It's easy to miss if you are doing something else while the CD boots. If you miss it, just hit 99 and install. Perhaps one shall and must try to replicate a problem several times before insisting on changes to the documentation?

Just use the 4GB Image für USB sticks. If you need more storage use a ssd.

Excellent, thanks! Is it possible for a nerd/geek to be cool? Really?  :P You betcha ;)

All fixed. The problem was the laptop from which I was uploading the new firmware. Just after I posted this question - the hard drive started to make bad noises and crashed. I uploaded the new firmware from another laptop and all is fine. Cheers!

use siproxd and set outbound nat to manual

I had to reboot a couple of times during the holidays for other reasons not related to this issue but I thought I'd post to say that I've been running for 24 days straight without any IPv6 connectivity problems while staying on 2.2.4. I'm tempted to upgrade to 2.2.6 but not sure if it's worth the trouble unless there's been a bug of some sort identified.  A friend of mine setup pfsense with 2.2.6 and he's had these IPv6 connectivity problems very similar to what I've experienced.  A reboot of his fw always seems to solve the problem. I'll post again to give another update next month. LoboTiger

Is "PowerD" and/or "Cryptographic Hardware Acceleration" turned on? If yes, turn 'em off and give it a try! Do you have any other "Advanced Settings" on? Oh, and another thing to look for. What Power Supply are you using. Is it an external brick style like Laptop PSU? If yes, can you test it(not just with a volt meter) OR replace it temporarily. They do go bad some times!

thank you heper for that fast reply :) I tried that but its only for mirroring or in single disk mode zfs. Can you direct me some few instructions on how to do it? ::)

On another system I had FreeBSD 10.1 installed and this adapter wasn't recognised but after an upgrade to 10.2 it was, so FreeBSD does have support for such an adapter. The problem is that pfSense is currently based on 10.1… I guess there must be some way of adding the required drivers, but I'm not sure how...

I have success.  I used Win32Disk and made a 4 GIG image stick.  It now installs.  I am not sure why? But I am glade I made progress.

Topic should be posted under Virtualization installations and techniques

LOL, don't know why I thought his netgear was a switch  :o

I did end up doing that, but I downloaded it to my flash drive and extracted the files.  According to a video I saw about it, I made one NIC bridged for the WAN and one internal for the LAN.  it said it made my WAN DHCP, but it shows no IP address for the WAN - only one for the LAN?  I am currently staying at a hotel and have no access to their router or anything like that - not sure if that matters or not?  Plus my host computer itself is running only on wifi as the hotel has made it that way.  Please see below ss for what I am referring to.  Any help would be greatly appreciated. http://prntscr.com/9u2wfi

Broadcom NICs? Hmmm, Don't like them much. But at least Dell (depending on model) make drivers (probably not relevant) and firmware updates easy. So go check and see if there is a firmware update available for the NICs.  (BIOS too, while your there).

You also might want to check your BIOS' disk options, IDE vs AHCI, and see if that helps at all if the amd64 build doesn't fix it for you.  Wouldn't hurt to check for any BIOS updates for that hardware, and reset it back to factory defaults as well just in case something got changed over the years.