Creating a Memstick installer is not working.

[Doug183]

Something either is missing in the wiki https://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Writing_Disk_Images or there is a problem with pfSense-CE-memstick-2.3.2-RELEASE-amd64.img.gz.  I tried both and a Mac and PC, and neither seems to format the empty USB stick.  I also tried decompressing the .gz file myself and running the dd command directly.  Again, it looked like something was happening but using OS X DiskUtil in terminal, there were no partitions created on the USB stick and it wouldn't boot a computer.  Burning the ISO worked and luckily the computer where PFsense was to be installed has an CD drive.  But any chance to get this fixed or elucidate us in the wiki how to really make a memstick installer.

PS.  for El Capitan (OSX) the bs=1M command, the M needs to be lowercase 'm'.

[Derelict]

This is what I do:

Insert the memstick.

$ diskutil list
/dev/disk0 (internal, physical):
  #:                      TYPE NAME                    SIZE      IDENTIFIER
  0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *512.1 GB  disk0
  1:                        EFI EFI                    209.7 MB  disk0s1
  2:                  Apple_HFS Macintosh HD            511.3 GB  disk0s2
  3:                Apple_Boot Recovery HD            650.0 MB  disk0s3
/dev/disk2 (external, physical):
  #:                      TYPE NAME                    SIZE      IDENTIFIER
  0:    FDisk_partition_scheme                        *8.1 GB    disk2
  1:                DOS_FAT_32 NO NAME                8.1 GB    disk2s1

It's disk2 so:

$ diskutil unmountdisk /dev/disk2
Unmount of all volumes on disk2 was successful

$ sudo -s
Password:

gzcat pfSense-CE-memstick-2.3.2-RELEASE-amd64.img.gz | dd of=/dev/rdisk2 bs=64k

Note the raw (character) disk device rdisk2. This mirrors the referenced docs and writes about 14x faster than the block device /dev/disk2 on my system. I see very little increase in speed using bs=1m over bs=64k at the expense of more (but still pretty insignificant) CPU time.

Then Pull the stick (it won't be mounted) and boot whatever with it.

[heper]

what error did you receive ? i've personally never had issue's with the instructions (this doesn't mean that problems are impossible)
unzipping a zip file is the correct way to go about this. you need to write the .img file to flashdisk

are you sure the usb-stick isn't faulty?

what software did you use on windows ?

[Doug183]

Thanks for the info.

I got Windows 7 Instructions working.  I had to make the Win32 Disk Imager to run as administrator.

OSX, I will go back and test later.

[davidlopez89]

Thanks for the info  :)