2.7.0 upgrade crash
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@aiz I remember when UEFI started to be more prevalent some machines would no longer boot unless set to legacy. USB flash drives would have to set to specific speeds to be read by the boot process, UEFI does link into the boot process more than in the past and could be the reason for the issues. DOS based (Fat 16) (Fat 32) (NTFS) partitioned drives that originally installed with the newer software that now contains upgrades to UEFI requirements would cause issues. Have you attempted to backup the configuration and do some repartitioning with some new SSD drives after do a fresh install after you enabled UEFI in the system BIOS? That might fix a lot of issues, you could use ZFS at that point.
I use to have 10k rpm SCSI drives that sounded like a 747 when they ran, it was wicked cool. Today SSD drives don't make a sound.
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The there was the 500M word (24 bit) drum we had on the SDS-930. Those were the days!
You could be right on the UEFI.
Thanks.
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@aiz my first PC was a At&T PC 6300 that rocked a 10MB drive ran DOS 3.11. I loved playing with autoexect.bat and config.sys files adding different drivers and menus so it would auto configure when it booted it was so cool. I use to have something called MS-DOSSHELL not the shell like today, it was a windows type file program that my mouse with would work with. Load mem upper, echo off, all sorts of fun when I was younger I was elementary school aged. I had this cool sound blaster 16 ISA card with a talking parrot and a microphone. Screen was monochrome green. I would research UEFI in your BIOS. You may need a reinstall with it enabled. Low level formats took forever remember those? When y2k was announced I thought everyone was crazy as it just rolled back over because I tested it before hand with my old system
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@aiz I just took a class on assembly code. Amazing stuff.
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I think you put your finger on the problem. The boxes I have were purchased in 2015. UEFI???? I'll take a look. But I still wonder why they booted fine before I restored the configuration and wouldn't boot after I restored the configuration. That was true if I used one of the install boots (MSDOS??) and not the other (UEFI???) boot. Wish I knew more about this. But I'll do some digging.
My first "PC" was a Xerox 820 and then an 860 and then an IBM PC. Thanks for the memories.
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J jimp moved this topic from Problems Installing or Upgrading pfSense Software on
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Is that screenshot where it appeared to hang after restoring the config?
More commonly after restoring a config is to end up with the wrong console set as primary. Usually the last thing shown will be the NICs linking for example.
Steve
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The screen shot is what happened during the reboot after the configuration restore.
Thanks for your interest.
Art
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And it hangs in the same place if you try to install 2.7 with GPT?
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I believe that the hang was with GPT. The strange thing is that when I go into bios to select the memstick for boot, there were two choices. One allowed MSDOS MBR and the other said that MSDOS MBR was unbootable "with this platform" or something like that.
The crash occurred with GPT and with the version that said MSDOS MBR was unbootable. I hope this all makes sense. I really don't have much expertise here.
Art
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The memstick can be booted EFI or Legacy BIOS and if your platform is configured to boot both it will show them as two choices.
The installer detects how it was booted and uses that to advise what install type can be booted. If your platform actually boots both it likely will work with either.Steve
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@stephenw10
Thanks, I'm learning. When I boot in EFI with GPT, I get the crash after the restore. At least I am pretty sure that is the scenario.Art
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OK so you boot EFI and install as GPT and that all works OK?
It then boots up OK and you restore the config in the GUI?
Then when it reboots it hangs at that screenshot above?
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That's correct.
The other thing I will note is that when 2.7.0 came out, I tried the usual upgrade online. The result was the same crash after the upgrade was installed.
That's what led me to try a complete reinstall of the software.
Art
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Hmm, well that pretty much must be a console setting in the config you're importing. Check the main <system> section at the top of the file for console values.
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I'm afraid I'm not sure what to look for. However, I do see that the primary console setting is "serial". In fact the box I am using is "vga".
I'll change that and see what happens.
Thanks for the hint.
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Yup, remove that line from the config so it uses the default console which looks like it's the EFI console there.
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Your suggestion seemed very logical as it might explain the crash after the online update.
I removed the line in the configuration file and I also tried changing the line to designate "video" rather than "serial". Both gave the same result. Before the changes, the boot up stopped with a blank screen with a blinking cursor. After the changes, the boot up stopped with an alphanumeric graphic of the pfSense logo and a flashing cursor. The boot did not complete.
Since I am not seeing complaints from others, it looks like this is issue may be the result of a 10 year old bios in my Gigbox units. It appears that something is destroying the UEFI file when I do the configuration file restore.
I'll stick with bios. It will be interesting to see what happens during the next pfSense update.
Thanks for your suggestion and help.
