PfSense won't boot after installation
-
I have been running pfSense off the LiveCD for the past week to test it and stuff. I seem to like it, so I used the #99 choice of installing pfSense to the server.
I choose the Quick/Easy Install, answered all the questions.
Now when the machine rebooted I get this:
F1 FreeBSD boot: F1 \
And thats it. It just sits there like that. Did I do something wrong?
-
Sometimes that can happen when there is some peculiar interaction between the kernel, BIOS, and/or disk controller.
Try some of the suggestions here:
http://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Boot_Troubleshooting
-
Hmmm I don't see anything on that page that relates to my problem. Is there something I'm missing? I have no idea where to start here.
Don't forget, I'm able to boot to the LiveCD just fine.
-
How do you know they don't relate to your problem if you haven't actually tried any of them?
-
I guess nothing on that page describes what I'm seeing… I don't get any of the errors referred to on that page.
-
You should just go down the list and try them one by one, but you can skip the ones that mention ALIX or NanoBSD.
-
Well I didn't have any luck with the suggestions on that page.
I read about similar issues people had on the forum and their solution was to use 1.2.2. So I got the pfSense 1.2.2. LiveCD running, did the install and I got farther this time.
The installer asked me a lot more questions than with 1.2.3. I answered everything with pretty much whatever it recommended, along the lines of boot blocks etc. I have a single SATA HDD 160G, I partitioned and formatted it as the installer suggested, essentially using the whole disk.
After rebooting finally, I got this:
F1: FreeBSD Default: F1 error 1 lba 293178511 No /boot/loader pfSense/i386 boot Default: 0:ad(0,a)/boot/kernel/kernel boot: error 1 lba 293178511 No /boot/kernel/kernel
and it repeats itself anytime I press Enter.
So whats the deal now? The installer didn't install a boot loader? At the end of the install it asked me:
You may now wish to install bootblocks on one or more disks. If you already have a boot manager installed, you can skip this step (but you may have to configure your boot manager spearately.) If you wish to install pfSense on a disk other than your first disk, you will need to put the bootblock on at least your first disk and the pfSense disk.
So basically, it was saying, that if I didn't have a boot manager (loader?), to have the installer install the boot manager for me, which I went ahead and did. So why is it saying there is no boot loader now that I've restarted?
Thanks for the help. This is not very straightforward and its frusterating.
-
Well in one last attempt, I went back to the 1.2.3 LiveCD and did the install after the bootup. Instead this time I went through the custom install instead of the Quick/Easy install. Apparently the quick install didn't do some things right the first time around, because I got better results when going with the custom install route.
Here is where I got stuck this time. This is after the install and reboot without the CD in the drive:
It just sits there stuck. Can anyone help me?
-
Whew, got it to work now, by not choosing "Packet Mode" during the bootblock creation part of the installation.