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

electrofreak

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

jimp

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

electrofreak

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?

jimp

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.

electrofreak

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

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

jimp

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.

electrofreak

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.

axxxxe

@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!

jimp

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

electrofreak

That is actually the weird thing…. 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.

jimp

It may have needed the whole disk wiped then.

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