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Convert bootable USB to ISO?

Scheduled Pinned Locked Moved Problems Installing or Upgrading pfSense Software
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  • P
    phatty
    last edited by Apr 26, 2017, 4:07 PM

    I know it's a weird request, but I have an SG-4860 where I believe both the USB ports and the internal storage are fried.. Yes this easily could be a red flag that this whole unit is trash, but trying to revive it back to life as the unit is not that old.

    Is it possible to convert the ADI USB Flash images over to ISO?  I can get my hardware unit to boot off SATA/CD, but not any USB Flash drives. The problem I then run into is that I want the custom ADI image and serial console output during the install, but the default ISO image doesn't support that.  I posted this question in my original hardware thread, but I thought it may be more relevant if posted here.

    All the Windows tools I have found won't read the proper boot sector info for the flash drive.    I am starting to think I am out of luck on performing a fresh install.

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    • K
      kpa
      last edited by Apr 26, 2017, 5:46 PM Apr 26, 2017, 4:57 PM

      Unless the ADI images use some custom non-FreeBSD based bootloader (such as GRUB) a conversion is not going to work. FreeBSD's bootloader is medium specific and you need a different kind of boot loader for an ISO image that you would for a USB memory stick or a harddrive.

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      • P
        phatty
        last edited by Apr 26, 2017, 6:03 PM

        I suspected a response like that, guess I will attempt once more installing pfsense onto the mSATA in a different system and then moving it over.

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        • S
          stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
          last edited by Apr 30, 2017, 1:07 AM

          You could probably write the install image to a SATA hard drive and boot from that. Then install to mSATA.

          Or if you can boot anything at all (some Linux distro from ISO) you can boot that then download the installer image and DD it to the on-board eMMC. Then boot from that an install to mSATA.

          Steve

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