Yet another can't boot from USB loser (on APU)
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I am trying to boot pfSense from a USB thumb drive on a new APU1D4 system, with the goal of installing on a mSATA SSD.
I don't think I'm having a serial line speed issue, which seems to be the most common failure.
I used "Win32 Disk Imager" to write the current memstick image onto a 8Gb thumb drive. The image is "pfSense-memstick-2.1.5-RELEASE-amd64-20140825-0744.img" I have tried 3 different thumb drives, a 4Gb Sony (actualy Kingston), some generic 8Gb stick, and an 8Gb PNY purchased today.
I am able to boot from an SD card with the most recent nanoBSD image. To see if the thumb drive was working, I booted from SD with the thumb drive inserted, mounted the the file system on the thumb drive, and did a "du -k" on it. The output ended with
222533 /mnt/testwhich is close to the what du on "/" produces. So that seems good.
I am using PuTTY for the console. The output from power up to hang is below. It takes about 15 seconds. Starting with the serial line at 9600 results is 15 seconds of garbled output, as expected, and then nothing.
The transcript ends with a "/", Actually one "/" is printed and then overprinted with another "/" about a second later.
If I hit control-C a after the first "/" is printed but before the second, I get to the FreeBSD boot loader:
FreeBSD/x86 boot Default: 0:ad(0,a)/boot/loaderOnce the second "/" is printed, the system no longer responds to the keyboard.
Thanks very much for any help,
Norman
PC Engines APU BIOS build date: Apr 5 2014 Reading data from file [bootorder] SeaBIOS (version ?-20140405_120742-frink) SeaBIOS (version ?-20140405_120742-frink) Found coreboot cbmem console @ df150400 Found mainboard PC Engines APU Relocating init from 0x000e8e71 to 0xdf1065e0 (size 39259) Found CBFS header at 0xfffffb90 found file "bootorder" in cbmem CPU Mhz=1001 Found 27 PCI devices (max PCI bus is 05) Copying PIR from 0xdf160400 to 0x000f27a0 Copying MPTABLE from 0xdf161400/df161410 to 0x000f25b0 with length 1ec Copying ACPI RSDP from 0xdf162400 to 0x000f2590 Copying SMBIOS entry point from 0xdf16d800 to 0x000f2570 Using pmtimer, ioport 0x808 Scan for VGA option rom EHCI init on dev 00:12.2 (regs=0xf7f08420) Found 1 lpt ports Found 2 serial ports AHCI controller at 11.0, iobase f7f08000, irq 11 EHCI init on dev 00:13.2 (regs=0xf7f08520) EHCI init on dev 00:16.2 (regs=0xf7f08620) Searching bootorder for: /rom@img/setup Searching bootorder for: /rom@img/memtest OHCI init on dev 00:12.0 (regs=0xf7f04000) OHCI init on dev 00:13.0 (regs=0xf7f05000) OHCI init on dev 00:14.5 (regs=0xf7f06000) OHCI init on dev 00:16.0 (regs=0xf7f07000) Searching bootorder for: /pci@i0cf8/usb@12,2/storage@1/*@0/*@0,0 Searching bootorder for: /pci@i0cf8/usb@12,2/usb-*@1 Searching bootorder for: /pci@i0cf8/usb@16,2/storage@1/*@0/*@0,0 Searching bootorder for: /pci@i0cf8/usb@16,2/usb-*@1 USB MSC vendor='Multiple' product='Card Reader' rev='1.00' type=0 removable=1 Device reports MEDIUM NOT PRESENT scsi_is_ready returned -1 Unable to configure USB MSC drive. Unable to configure USB MSC device. USB MSC vendor='PNY' product='USB 2.0 FD' rev='1100' type=0 removable=1 USB MSC blksize=512 sectors=15810560 All threads complete. Scan for option roms Running option rom at c000:0003 iPXE (http://ipxe.org) 00:00.0 C000 PCI2.10 PnP PMMpmm call arg1=1 pmm call arg1=0 +DF0F06C0pmm call arg1=1 pmm call arg1=0 +DF04C5C0 C000 Searching bootorder for: /rom@genroms/pxeboot.rom Build date: Apr 5 2014 System memory size: 4592 MB Press F12 for boot menu. Searching bootorder for: HALT drive 0x000f2520: PCHS=0/0/0 translation=lba LCHS=984/255/63 s=15810560 Space available for UMB: c1000-ee800, f0000-f2520 Returned 253952 bytes of ZoneHigh e820 map has 7 items: 0: 0000000000000000 - 000000000009fc00 = 1 RAM 1: 000000000009fc00 - 00000000000a0000 = 2 RESERVED 2: 00000000000f0000 - 0000000000100000 = 2 RESERVED 3: 0000000000100000 - 00000000df14e000 = 1 RAM 4: 00000000df14e000 - 00000000e0000000 = 2 RESERVED 5: 00000000f8000000 - 00000000f9000000 = 2 RESERVED 6: 0000000100000000 - 000000011f000000 = 1 RAM enter handle_19: NULL Booting from Hard Disk… Booting from 0000:7c00 / -
UPDATE: SOLVED
First I tried updating the bios (build 9/8/2014), which involves booting TinyCore Linux on a thumb drive, which I did with no trouble. (Still using Win32DiskImager)
I was still unable to boot pfSense on a thumb drive.
Then I tired writing the same pfSense image to a new thumb drive using 'dd' on MacOS. That finally worked.
So the combination of my 5 year old desktop, its USB plumbing, Win32DiskImager, and certain memory sticks results in unbootable media.