Installing pfSense causes HD to fail?
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I couldn't enter the BIOS or Boot screen because it suddenly stopped detecting my keyboard, and it wouldn't auto-boot either.
These are not the symptoms of a bad hard drive. Looks like something more fundamental like a bad power supply or (more likely) a bad motherboard. How old is the system? Try the supposedly bad drives in another system to check.
Steve
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Remove the hard drive from your machine. Boot it up and go into the BIOS settings; make sure that booting from CD is allowed and has a higher priority than the hard drive. Save your settings and reboot (without a hard drive attached but with a bootable CD, could be pfsense or otherwise inserted into the optical disk bay) to ensure that CD booting indeed works.
If that much works your machine is ok. Reattach your IDE drive and reboot. The machine will boot from the CD again. Now try to reinstall pfsense or something else (like linux) on your hard drive to see what happens.
The symptoms that you reported frankly do not make much sense. My impression is that you have a garbled hard drive which boots up a garbled OS and overtakes basic system device drivers like USB ports, etc.
Halea -
@haleakalas:
Remove the hard drive from your machine. Boot it up and go into the BIOS settings; make sure that booting from CD is allowed and has a higher priority than the hard drive. Save your settings and reboot (without a hard drive attached but with a bootable CD, could be pfsense or otherwise inserted into the optical disk bay) to ensure that CD booting indeed works.
If that much works your machine is ok. Reattach your IDE drive and reboot. The machine will boot from the CD again. Now try to reinstall pfsense or something else (like linux) on your hard drive to see what happens.
The symptoms that you reported frankly do not make much sense. My impression is that you have a garbled hard drive which boots up a garbled OS and overtakes basic system device drivers like USB ports, etc.
HaleaI've already unplugged the HD and booted into the BIOS. Booting from the CD does work, but only when the HD is not plugged in. It's already set to boot to the CD first. But when I plug the HD in and restart it, it won't boot. I know it's weird but it simply won't boot into anything if the HD is plugged in. I've also tried booting into a liveCD and then plugging the HD in to format it, just to see if maybe it would work. It didn't.
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IDE is not hot-plug so don't try that again! It does sound like it could be a bad IDE cable, or a bad connector or a bad channel on the board.
Steve
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Could it be something to do with Master/Slave jumpers?
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I've already unplugged the HD and booted into the BIOS. Booting from the CD does work, but only when the HD is not plugged in. It's already set to boot to the CD first. But when I plug the HD in and restart it, it won't boot. I know it's weird but it simply won't boot into anything if the HD is plugged in. I've also tried booting into a liveCD and then plugging the HD in to format it, just to see if maybe it would work. It didn't.
Are you connecting the hard disk drive to the same IDE port (the same ribbon cable) than the CD? If so, do you have a second IDE connector that you can use for the hard drive? I am assuming that the CD, HDD connection is the same than when you got it to work the first time (when the CD booted pfsense, the HDD was recognized and you could do a full install to the hard drive) and since you did not change any jumpers on the motherboard or the drives, or cables, etc.
Halea -
@haleakalas:
I've already unplugged the HD and booted into the BIOS. Booting from the CD does work, but only when the HD is not plugged in. It's already set to boot to the CD first. But when I plug the HD in and restart it, it won't boot. I know it's weird but it simply won't boot into anything if the HD is plugged in. I've also tried booting into a liveCD and then plugging the HD in to format it, just to see if maybe it would work. It didn't.
Are you connecting the hard disk drive to the same IDE port (the same ribbon cable) than the CD? If so, do you have a second IDE connector that you can use for the hard drive? I am assuming that the CD, HDD connection is the same than when you got it to work the first time (when the CD booted pfsense, the HDD was recognized and you could do a full install to the hard drive) and since you did not change any jumpers on the motherboard or the drives, or cables, etc.
HaleaI am and have been using two different ribbon cables for the HD and the optical drive. Besides briefly switching cables around to test to see if that was the problem, they are in the same order.
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Please check to see if the CD/DVD ROM drive and the hard disk drive have they jumpers set on "Cable Select" or "CS".
If so, change both drives' jumpers to "master" (while they are attached to 2 separate IDE ports with 2 separate ribbon cables. (If you experiment with connecting them to the same IDE port with the same ribbon cable, have the hard drive on master and the cd rom on slave)
Then give another try.
While manipulating the drives, ribbon cable or any internals on your box, make sure that the power is off.
Halea -
I did as you said, since they were both set to CS. It didn't work though. The only thing that works is unplugging either the power or the IDE cable to the harddrive.
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2002 called…
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2002 called…
That was a useful post.
Unfortunately for me, all I have an old old desktop that I inherited. I don't have plenty of money to throw around, so instead of just doing nothing because it's not the very best and newest thing out there, I figured I'd work with what I have.
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If haven't tried it yet, set the jumpers to CS and put both drives on the cable that you have used successfully with the CD-ROM drive.
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2002 called…
That was a useful post.
Unfortunately for me, all I have an old old desktop that I inherited. I don't have plenty of money to throw around, so instead of just doing nothing because it's not the very best and newest thing out there, I figured I'd work with what I have.
Sorry, but your hardware (and 2.0.1) is so old you can't even get the hard drive working. You said:
A local computer guy, as well as some friends of mine, tell me that it is a harddrive failure. Since it was a new harddrive it's a little unlikely, but not impossible I guess.
There is no such thing as a "new" IDE hard drive. The oldest drive I have around here is an 80GB SATA drive. It is 11 years old. Send a post-paid envelope and it's all yours. As in free.
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The oldest drive I have around here is an 80GB SATA drive. It is 11 years old.
I would say that your hardware collection is weak. ;) However your SATA drive is impressively old. I don't have a sata drive anywhere near that old (plenty of ide drives) and SATA was only released in 2003.
I agree though that the hardware in question is old and must be considered suspect until proven otherwise.
Steve
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If haven't tried it yet, set the jumpers to CS and put both drives on the cable that you have used successfully with the CD-ROM drive.
Just tried. There was no change.
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What I find very odd is that you used two different IDE drives in this computer and you were able to install pfsense on both of them initially. But each one of them failed as soon as you finished your pfsense install and rebooted. Is my understanding correct?
If that's the case, I am wondering if you don't have something else going on which wreaks havoc in your system. And chances are that if you take a third IDE drive and do the same things you'll get the same result.The closest thing I can think of is a buggy device driver which once was able to physically damage certain types of Seagate hard drives as the cylinder boundaries were overwritten and the read/write heads fell of the edge of the disks. This goes back way back though, it was before the IDE generation I think.
I am running out of thoughts about how to further help you. I understand you can't afford spending much money on this thing right now. But consider an alternative to the hard disk drive. For instance, if your BIOS supports USB booting, try to setup pfsense on a decent quality flash usb while using the nanobsd version of pfsense. I have been doing so on my home router for quite some time now. A good quality 4GB flash disk can be purchased for $10.
If USB booting is not an option, you can still do the same by booting a Linux CD with GRUB set up so that as soon as the CD is booted it loads the usb device driver and loads the system from your flash disk.
So there may be alternate solutions to achieve what you need if nanobsd can be used.
Halea
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@haleakalas:
What I find very odd is that you used two different IDE drives in this computer and you were able to install pfsense on both of them initially. But each one of them failed as soon as you finished your pfsense install and rebooted. Is my understanding correct?
If that's the case, I am wondering if you don't have something else going on which wreaks havoc in your system. And chances are that if you take a third IDE drive and do the same things you'll get the same result.Yes. That is exactly correct.
I had considered using a USB drive. I do belive the BIOS supports USB booting, and if I unplug the HD then it should work no problem.
