PFSENSE booting problem – please help
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I tried installing freebsd 7 to see if this problem exists in the normal install and it worked fine. This appears to be a problem with the pfsense installer and not freebsd itself
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I was having different problems before I upgraded my bios. I would installed w/o GRUB and it is wouldn't boot at all - I would get something about the there being No /boot/loader and then it would follow with error 1 lba #######, which was followed by No /boot/kernel/kernel/. This is just from memory, so I can't be certain it's correct.
So I tried installing with GRUB as an options - which failed during installation (couldn't moutn fs). But it got further after reboot - I got the error wallabybob mentioned. Then when I mounted the filesystem by typing ufs:da0s1a and it would boot. I thought it would be adxsxa, so i suspect i was booting from the cd-rom.
When you say "can't mount the filesystem" do you mean you saw something like:
Trying to mount root from ufs:/dev/ad0s1a
Manual root filesystem specification:
<fstype>:<device> Mount <device>using filesystem <fstype>eg. ufs:da0s1a
? List valid disk boot devices
<empty line=""> Abort manual inputmountroot></empty></fstype></device></device></fstype>
Finally I gave up and upgraded the BIOS. Now all installation options lead to the same place. With or w/o GRUB and with or w/o Packet Mode. They all just give this upon booting:
\
I noticed that my bios seems to assign the HDD and CD to random channels after every bootup - something the hdd will be on 0 and then the next time on 3.
FYI - I'm using a Tyan tiger i7501R motherboard. And I've now tried two different HDD.
Could posting the IDE options from the bios help? I've looked at other posts and suggestions and it is not clear to me that my bios allows for what they did, but perhaps newer eyes will see something I didn't.
Lawrence
PS. Aklspec sorry for hijacking your thread…
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yes I'm also sorry for the hijack. I installed pfsense again without packet mode on the bootblocks and it got me further. I get to the pfsense menu, the line /boot/kernel/acpi.kp text=0x520e8 data=0x23a0+0x186c syms=[0x485c0+0x4+0xb056] then there is just a \ and nothing
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So that is w/o GRUB and w/o Packet Mode? Perhaps I'll try that.
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Tried w/o Packet Mode and w/o GRUB, now I'm back to the old problem - I get the following:
F1 pfSense Default: F1 error 1 lba 357911055 No /boot/loader pfSense/i386 boot Default: 0:ad(0,a)/boot/kernel/kernel boot: error 1 lba 357911055 No /boot/kernel/kernel pfSense/i386 boot Default: 0:ad(0,a)/boot/kernel/kernel boot: -
Here are my BIOS options, Bold is the current setting.
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IDE Legacy Configuration
S-ATA Running Enhanced Mode
P-ATA Channel Selection
S-ATA Ports Definition
Configure S-ATA as RAID
Hard Disk Write Protect
IDE Detect Time Out (Sec)
ATA(PI) 80Pin Cable Detection
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Disabled, P-ATA Only, S-ATA Only, P-ATA & S-ATA
Yes, No
Primary, Secondary, Both
P0-3rd./P1-4th., P0-4th./P1-3rd.
No, Yes
Disabled, Enabled
0, 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35
HOST & DEVICE, HOST, DEVICE
|It then lists all the attached devices and under the HDD this is what I get.
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Device
Vendor
Size
LBA Mode
Block Mode
PIO Mode
Async DMA
Ultra DMA
S.M.A.R.T.Type
LBA/Large Mode
Block (Multi-Sector Trans)
PIO Mode
DMA Mode
S.M.A.R.T
32Bit Data Transfer |
:Hard Disk
:Maxtor 6B200R0
:203.9GB
:Supported
:16Sectors
:4
:MultiWord DMA-2
:Ultra DMA-6
:SupportedAuto, CDROM, ARMD
Disabled, Auto
Disabled, Auto
Auto, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4
Auto, SWDMA0, SWDMA1, SWDMA2, MWDMA0, MWDMA1, MWDMA2, UDMA0, UDMA1, UDMA2, UDMA3, UDMA4, UDMA5, UDMA6
Auto, Disabled, Enabled
Disabled, Enabled |I also have the drive with CS jumper and it is a single connection ribbon. If you have any suggestion on what might need to be changed in the BIOS let me know.
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There are problem reports from three separate users here. My apologies if I confuse the details.
On motherboards with S-ATA support, RAID and AHCI there are lots of possible combinations of BIOS settings related to the hard drives. And they can have different names depending on the BIOS. These settings can impact the way FreeBSD assigns unit numbers to ATA drives. For example, I've done some experiments on a ASUS P5LD2-SE motherboard and without changing any cabling but just changing BIOS IDE configuration settings I have had a S-ATA drive appear to FreeBSD as ad0, ad4 or ad8 (not sure about ad8!). The point is, if you play around with the BIOS IDE settings between installing ad attempting to boot you may have some trouble.
FreeBSD seems to reserve ata-0 and ata-1 for disk controllers at legacy I/O addresses. If you configure your IDE so neither P-ATA nor S-ATA are in legacy mode then FreeBSD won't have ata-0 nor ata-1 and consequently won't have drives ad0, ad1, ad2 or ad3. I have no idea how this interacts with GRUB which will no doubt have its own way (possibly well documented) of assigning hard drive numbers. Lets leave GRUB out of this to remove an element of uncertainty.
I earlier stated I thought FreeBSD boot needed to be from a controller at legacy i/o addresses. I was mistaken, my apologies. I have seen reports on the net of various boot issues with S-ATA controllers in RAID or AHCI mode so lets disable those modes. pfSense is not normally disk intensive so there is little to be gained by enabling a higher performance disk mode. On that ASUS motherboard I mentioned earlier I successfully booted FreeBSD 7.0 from ad4, a S-ATA drive with Enhanced IDE mode enabled on S-ATA. With S-ATA in legacy mode the same drive became ad0 and I successfully booted FreeBSD 7.0. This is the mode I have routinely used for FreeBSD on this motherboard, so when the S-ATA drives was ad4 the boot ran through all the usual startup reporting then said it failed to find the root file system. This is because /etc/fstab on ad4 said the root file system was on ad0 and there was no ad0 because I'd played with the BIOS IDE configuration. I was able to use the hint from the OS to get the root file system mounted then changed /etc/fstab to specify the new drive id for the file systems, rebooted and all was well.
Suggestion: If you can, configure IDE in BIOS to have only P-ATA or S-ATA (depending on what drives you have), disable any unused disk controllers you can put the controller in legacy mode, reinstall and reboot.
I've not had any problems with pfSense installs on a number of older systems without S-ATA controllers. I've never used GRUB with pfSense.
I've recently put together a system with AMD 780G chipset for watching digital TV. I'll try a pfSense boot from CD and install on it to expand my experience. It may also contribute something to this topic.
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I tried installing pfSense 1.2.2 on an ASUS M3A78-EMH HDMI motherboard, the only motherboard which supports SATA and is available to me for this sort of experiment. The CD installer wouldn't get past reporting ehci0 unless I disabled USB. Once I got pfSense booted from the CD it didn't recognise the onboard Realtek LAN so I had only one available interface (plip0) and I couldn't figure out a way to get past that to install to a hard drive.
I then tried a 1.2.3 testing image. I burned it to CD then booted the CD and the onboard NIC was recognised. I rebooted and in the BIOS I enabled the USB interfaces and the boote completed. I was was enable to specify two VLANs on re0 as the interfaces and then I was able to install to ad8 (packet mode, not GRUB) and boot off ad8. ad8 was a S-ATA drive connected to a non-legacy S-ATA controller. In the BIOS I could set the Onchip SATA type to either SATA or AHCI and pfSense still booted from ad8.
Maybe its worth trying a 1.2.3 snapshot.
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Tried 1.2.3 and 2.0 - no help. I guess I need to start fiddling with the BIOS and just see what happens.
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Just installed trixbox without a problem. I had windows on this box before, no problem. I'm going to try to install freebsd and see what happens. Just seems odd that there are all these problems with the install. Okay, maybe not odd, but frustrating. My ultimate goal is to replace my pfSense and trixbox machines with one 1U server running pfSense and FreeSWITCH…
If I were to install pfS on another machine and then just take the drive out and put it in this machine would that have any chance of working?
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If I were to install pfS on another machine and then just take the drive out and put it in this machine would that have any chance of working?
I have successfully done this in the past. For least troublesome outcome, you should configure you drive on the "run" system to have the same unit number as on the "install" system, though if that doesn't happen (e.g. you install on ad0 and the drive is ad2 on the "run" system) I have found it not very hard to work around.
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I tried installing on another system and moving the drive over - didn't boot after move - couldn't find bootable media.
Then I dl'd FreeBSD 7.1 and installed it. Worked fine. The only thing that was strange was the mention that the disk geometry was incorrect during the install.
So I tried installing pfSense using the geometry FreeBSD used, didn't work either
I can't understand how FreeBSD would install and not pfSense. Now I'm trying to install pfSense on top of the FreeBSD, but I'm not really sure what I'm doing…
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Installing pfSense on top of FreeBSD didn't work. Probably didn't help that I didn't know what I was doing…
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I can't understand how FreeBSD would install and not pfSense.
I'm not sure what version of pfSense you have been trying to install. pfSense 1.2.2 is based on FreeBSD 7.0. You successfully installed FreeBSD 7.1. That suggests it may be worth trying pfSense 1.2.3 (PRERELEASE-TESTING) which is based on FreeBSD 7.1.
FreeBSD's hardware support sometimes lags that of other popular operating systems, particularly when encountering devices that don't quite behave according to specification or have their own unusual interpretation of the specification. I have two different types of USB adapters for notebook drives. One works well on FreeBSD, the three different versions of Linux I tried and Windows 2000. The other didn't work on FreeBSD 7.0 (frequently reported errors), didn't work on Linux 2.6.1x (can't remember the version exactly) but did work with Windows 2000 and Linux 2.6.2x (2x = 22 or 24 if I remember correctly). The second type was listed listed in a Linux driver file among types with "unusual" behaviour, the first type wasn't. You may have a similar sort of issue with your disk controller.
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I've already tried 1.2.3 early. Tried it again, still no luck. I even tried 2.0.
I would have given up by now and moved onto another distro, but I really want to run my pbx on my router. I alreay have pfSense, trixbox, Windows 2008 and then my workstation - this is just for my home. You can imagine the electric bill. If I could get pfSense on this 1U server and then use the FreeSwitch package that would be great.
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Lets try to simplify the situation. Can you boot FreeBSD 7.1 again and post the dmesg output so we get a report of what is in the system and FreeBSD's view of what is in the system.
The Tyan Tiger i7501R motherboard looks as if its been around for a while so I would expect the FreeBSD support for the chipset should have been fairly well exercised by now.
I've already tried 1.2.3 early. Tried it again, still no luck. I even tried 2.0.
What exactly is the problem "tried it again, still no luck"? pfSense install completes? with or without GRUB? pfSense install fails? If so, what error?
You earlier reported:
I noticed that my bios seems to assign the HDD and CD to random channels after every bootup - something the hdd will be on 0 and then the next time on 3.
Is this still happening? What report leads you to believe this is happening? (For example, if you boot FreeBSD 7.1 a few times is the hard drive sometimes reported as ad0 and sometimes as ad3?)
What is your drive configuration: is the CD S-ATA or P-ATA? The hard disk is P-ATA?
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Thanks for the all the help, but I've given up. Or at least given up installng it directly. I've installed VMware ESXi, so will see how that goes.
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For what it is worth - I have this SAME motherboard… and I have solved the booting problem...
I have a Single 40GB Sata hardrive.
Here is what I did...
1.) Reset the bios to "load optimized defaults"
2.) Boot from the CD-ROM ( I confirmed this both with USB EXTERNAL AND IDE drives)
3.) Change your configs in the terminal to what you need them (i.e. setup the interfaces, ip addresses, etc...)
4.) Choose option 99 to install to hardrive.
5.) USING THE OPTIMIZED DEFAULTS IN BIOS, It finds my Single SATA drive as AD4.
6.) I choose this disk to install to.
7.) ACCEPT THE DEFAULT CONFIGURATIONS THAT THE INSTALLER PROPOSES (i.e. format using defaults, partition using defaults etc...)
8.) IMPORTANT - ONCE YOU GET TO THE BOOTLOCK SCREEN --- ACCEPT THE DEFAULT BOOTLOCK.
9.) Finish the install and reboot.
10.) I unplugged my USB CD-ROM (and also unplugged an ide drive on 2nd install) after the machine rebooted...
11.) It booted right up into the BSD Terminal for me - NO ERRORS AT ALL...
IF YOU NEED EXACT BIOS SETTINGS I SUPPOSE I CAN BOOT BACK IN AND LOOK AT THESE FOR YOU... SHOOT ME AN E-MAIL OR PM...
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Hello,
Yesterday I had the same problem about
booting the 1.2.2 version, but now I've installed
it without any errors. What I did is set the harddisk
parameter manually in the bios as freeBSD is
reading it not correctly. I,m using the old p4 2.4GHZ
on MSI Mobo.
I just thought this might help. -
Sorry for off topic, but I have SEVERAL of these server boards (the Tyan Tiger i7501R) – I am very interested to hear if you were able to install ESXi ???
Please let me know either way! Thanks!