Installing from the CD ISO copied to a USB drive
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I'm trying to install PFSense on a machine with no CD/DVD drive, and no extra IDE connectors. I've seen a process where one can make a bootable USB drive, but it requires an install of FreeBSD. Is there a way to do this from Windows? I've already tried Unetbootin, but it just gave an error message.
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I'd take the hard drive out of the pfSense box, install it in the Windows machine (removing the Windows hard drive if necessary or to be safe), boot the pfSense install CD, install to the hard drive from the pfSense box, transfer the hard drive back to the pfSense box, boot and configure.
The boot on the pfSense box will likely fail because that hard drive has a different name from what it had when you installed, but that should be relatively easy to work around. (Startup will report something like 'Failed to mount root file system'). There are a least a couple of threads in the forums discussing this particular problem.
There are variations on this theme that don't require opening the Windows box but they are potentially a little more troublesome and require additional equipment over the suggested method.
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If you have a USB CD-ROM or a USB to IDE or SATA adapter, either should work for installing from the CD.
I haven't heard of whether anyone has had any success with making a working bootable pfSense installer on a USB flash drive using the iso image.