Cannot create bootable USB
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I've spent two days trying to figure this out… I've created bootable USB sticks for installing Windows, FreeNAS, Linux, etc. However, I have never had so much trouble trying to create one as I have for this distro. What am I missing? I'm at work so I have access to a Windows machine right now. Once home, I can use Ubuntu or Windows so feel free to give me ideas to try for either OS.
What I've done thus far:
I've downloaded the 64-bit USB .img (unpacked it, of course) and ran it through the latest versions of Rufus and Win32 Disk Imager. Upon completion, I was unable to browse the USB thumb drive (No letter would be assigned to it and I would be asked to format it if I tried to assign it a letter manually.) but I figured maybe that was normal. I tried booting to it and no boot code was found on said drive - or, so the errors said.I also tried in Ubuntu... I used something like:
dd if=/home/user/Downloads/pfSense-memstick-2.2.6-RELEASE-amd64-20151221-1450.img of=/dev/sdb bs=1MBDon't quote me on the block-size switch… Anyway, when I tried to browse the thumb drive in Linux, it showed up as something like 28MB drive. The Thumb drives I'm using are 32GB - more than enough to hold such an image but, for some reason, Linux will partition it to some very small size. It didn't matter because those attempts lead to similar boot errors as well.
What am I missing? This part of the process is normally so easy but, in this case, it's getting close to making me want to try another firewall/router project.
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Hi,
Just a thought : did you do a thorough test on USB stick (in short: it isn't broken ?).
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Hi,
Just a thought : did you do a thorough test on USB stick (in short: it isn't broken ?).
Once it's formatted, I'm able to copy data to it and use it. I use it, from time to time, to install Linux and Windows. So, as near as I can tell, it's a known-good thumb drive. Furthermore, I've now tested this on at least two known-good thumb drives.
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I don't know if this helps, but when I made my bootable USB using a free Windows USB imaging utility, I was getting similar errors about the the disk not being readable either.
But sure enough it worked when I booted hardware off of it. Both my Macs and Windows machines both thought the disk needed to be formatted but they were wrong.
I'll see if I can find the name of the Windows bootable utility for you.
Edit. It was called win32 disk imager.
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I don't know if this helps, but when I made my bootable USB using a free Windows USB imaging utility, I was getting similar errors about the the disk not being readable either.
But sure enough it worked when I booted hardware off of it. Both my Macs and Windows machines both thought the disk needed to be formatted but they were wrong.
I'll see if I can find the name of the Windows bootable utility for you.
Thanks; that would be helpful. I often test my bootable thumb drives via the computer I'm currently typing this on so I know - very well - how to boot to thumb drives. I don't necessarily do the install but I will make sure they can boot to their menus. But, as I've said, I cannot get these things to boot on this machine.
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I hope this helps.
I used the memstick version and win32 disk imager and as noted, Windows and Macs both thought the resultant USB disk needed to be formatted.
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I hope this helps.
I used the memstick version and win32 disk imager and as noted, Windows and Macs both thought the resultant USB disk needed to be formatted.
Just tried that…. Didn't work. As you said, Windows cannot "see" the thumb drive and wants to format it. Furthermore, the size, in Disk Manager, went from 32GB to 24MB. Obviously, I didn't format it afterwards as I wanted to test it. Like before, this one didn't work either. Gave me the following error:
The selected boot device failed. Press any key to reboot the system.I'm currently, creating one of my typical Ubuntu Live USB thumb drives. I'm merely doing this to make sure I'm not crazy… Rebooting now to test my thumb drive again.
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Finally got it to boot. Only took 4 tries today… ??? Is the image designed to be for BIOS, UEFI or some hybrid that's usable on both boot options?
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Most likely BIOS (or "Legacy" boot mode on newer computers)… I don't believe pfSense (or maybe even FreeBSD in general) uses UEFI yet.
