Installing from USB drive in Windows

churchi

Hi All,

I have spent the last few hours trying to make a bootable USB stick for pfsense and i have had no luck.

I have 2 x 8GB USB sticks and i have tried to follow exactly the steps in the first thread.

So i have inserted my usb stick and run the program Win32DiskImager.exe
I have tried to install this image: pfSense-memstick-2.1-BETA0-amd64-20121129-2021.img and pfSense-2.1-BETA0-4g-amd64-nanobsd_vga-20121129-2021.img
and i have had no luck at all. It writes the file correctly however when i put it back into my pc windows says it needs to be formatted and when i boot it on my little pc which i want to install pfsense on it will not recognise the usb stick in the machine.

Am i missing something here?

If anyone can provide me some help that would be great.

I have used 2 different brand USB sticks.

Thank you.

msi

I haven't had the need to use the USB image, but nonetheless:

I hope you've had a look at: http://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Installing_pfSense#Windows
and given Physdiskwrite a try, I remember it worked quite well when I tried using M0n0Wall and more recently
the embedded images. physdiskwrite can be used with a GUI nowadays on Windows to make things easier.

I expect the image to be using UFS, FreeBSD's default filesstem, which is a filesystem that Windows is not able to read.
Windows will (erroneously) propose you to format the memory stick with the unknown FS, don't do that :-)

I don't think that this is a question specific to the 2.1 series which is still considered beta (but a quite-well-working beta for quite a lot of us)

arad85

I use unetbootin as the method of creating a bootable USB stick and the LiveCD (ISO images) very happily with Windows.

Does the machine you are trying to boot pfsense on the USB stick have support for USB boot in the BIOS?

NOYB

@churchi:

. . . when i boot it on my little pc which i want to install pfsense on it will not recognise the usb stick in the machine.

Am i missing something here?

If anyone can provide me some help that would be great.

BOIS settings to recognize USB as boot device.
Press boot menu key during POST to see and select bootable devices.

maverick_slo

@arad85:

I use unetbootin as the method of creating a bootable USB stick and the LiveCD (ISO images) very happily with Windows.

Does the machine you are trying to boot pfsense on the USB stick have support for USB boot in the BIOS?

I use exactly the same software it is working great!

Regards,
M

churchi

Hi Guys,

Thanks for all of the replies. I had tried to make the USB with the unetbootin software + the LiveCD image, however it wouldn't boot. I have now used an external CD-ROM disk with the system and it has booted without issues. I didn't think it would be so hard to make a USB drive boot on my system.

Either way thanks for all of the help and the crisis has been averted.

Cheers.