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    /sbin/bsdlabel -B -r -w ad4s1 auto FAILED

    Scheduled Pinned Locked Moved Problems Installing or Upgrading pfSense Software
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    • jimpJ
      jimp Rebel Alliance Developer Netgate
      last edited by

      Have you tried making multiple partitions? You might try making one partition about 4gb for /, then use the rest of the disk for /usr

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      • E
        electrofreak
        last edited by

        I suppose I could try that, but I'm wondering why that would make a difference. Could you explain why that would help it?

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        • jimpJ
          jimp Rebel Alliance Developer Netgate
          last edited by

          Some BIOS implementations have issues booting partitions that cross the 1024 cylinder boundary.

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          • E
            electrofreak
            last edited by

            jimp, thank you for your help, but that still did not work. I created a 4gb for / and it still had trouble running the bsdlabel command (/dev/ad6s1: no such file or directory)

            Any other ideas?

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            • jimpJ
              jimp Rebel Alliance Developer Netgate
              last edited by

              Can you break out into a shell and look at the install log in /tmp? (I think it's /tmp, it may be in /var/tmp)

              It may be that a command before that is really the one that fails. If ad6s1 doesn't exist, but ad6 does, that might mean that fdisk failed.

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              • E
                electrofreak
                last edited by

                Sounds reasonable, but how do I get to a shell from the install process?

                I did a quick google search on how to do itโ€ฆ and came across this, which might be helpful to me just by chance. I will try his suggestion in the mean time.

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                • jimpJ
                  jimp Rebel Alliance Developer Netgate
                  last edited by

                  You should be able to cancel out of the install and get back to the pfSense menu, and option 8 is a shell prompt.

                  There may also be a button to view the log when you get that error.

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                  • E
                    electrofreak
                    last edited by

                    Actually, that mail list I came across turned out to be helpful!

                    Stupid Macs, grrr.

                    For future reference of people coming across this thread:

                    The problem turned out to be an initialization problem related to FreeBSD not
                    beeing able to wipe out partition created with a mac (EFI).
                    This is really a macintosh problem

                    Solution is:

                    1. Use Disk Utility and erase the disk
                    2. Format a "free space" partition using DOS Label

                    Once you have done that you can then start using your disk properly and install
                    whatever you want on It.

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                    • A
                      axxxxe
                      last edited by

                      @electrofreak:

                      Solution is:

                      1. Use Disk Utility and erase the disk
                      2. Format a "free space" partition using DOS Label

                      You = The Man.

                      This worked for me as well!

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                      • jimpJ
                        jimp Rebel Alliance Developer Netgate
                        last edited by

                        That is one of the suggestions here:

                        http://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Boot_Troubleshooting

                        From a shell on the Live CD:

                        # dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ad0 bs=8k count=16
                        # fdisk -I ad0
                        

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                        • E
                          electrofreak
                          last edited by

                          That is actually the weird thingโ€ฆ. I actually tried writing zeros to much of the disk (I got impatient, but it definitely got the first 16 blocks). Not sure why it didn't work, but... the Mac solution did, thankfully.

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                          • jimpJ
                            jimp Rebel Alliance Developer Netgate
                            last edited by

                            It may have needed the whole disk wiped then.

                            # dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ad0 bs=1M
                            

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