PfSense 1.2.3-RC3 not booting on your ALIX2 board? Read this.
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So I went to upgrade to pfSense 1.2.3-RC3, and found out it would not boot on my ALIX2D2 board. The nanoBSD boot loader would come up, and then just scroll a bunch of # signs across the screen.
Turns out I was running tinyBIOS 0.99 and 0.99h was released November of last year. If you upgrade to 0.99h, pfSense 1.2.3-RC3 will boot without any issues.
Now, you would think that upgrading the bios on your ALIX2Dx board is an easy task, but if you don't have a CF-to-IDE adapter, you will end up smashing your head in a wall trying to make a CF card with FreeDOS to flash the BIOS. After trying everything possible (and failing) to make the CF card without the adapter, I broke down and bought one. Using the adapter, it took me about 5 minutes to install FreeDOS and update the BIOS. To save everyone a lot of time, I have created an image of the bootable CF card with the 0.99h BIOS update.
You can download it here:
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=4URQE9ZNThe image is for a 32MB CF card, but you can write it to larger ones without problems. I've also included a windows drive image utility you can use to write the image to your CF card, but you can use physdiskwrite / dd / whatever as well. If you are having trouble writing the image to your CF card, delete the partitions on it and try again. If you are using Windows XP (or above) you can use "diskpart" to do this.
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This is already documented on the Doc Wiki.
http://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/ALIX_BIOS_Update_Procedure
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The guy tries to help and even shares his work and he gets the "that's already documented" treatment?
I would like to say thanks! ;D
Made it really easy for me!
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Well help is always appreciated, but if people would search and use the existing documentation there would be less time wasted on duplicated efforts and reinventing the wheel.
I could understand if there were some deficiency in the existing instructions, or if they were out of date. However, in this case, if he had looked up the issue on the Documentation Wiki, he wouldn't have needed to do all the research, writing, and so on. It's already been taken care of and kept up-to-date.
Also, we try to discourage people from downloading images from unofficial or non-developer sites for security and integrity reasons.