[solved] Installation failure, SCSI issues

[reinderien]

I am new to both BSD and pfSense.

I downloaded the latest AMD64 USB image and wrote it to a stick, booted, went through the custom install in multi-user mode, and everything looked OK until the actual file writing step. I'm getting messages like:

Execution of the command

/usr/bin/tar -C /mnt/ -xzpf /distrib/pfSense.txz

FAILED with a return code of 1.

(da0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): CAM status: SCSI Status Error
(da0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): SCSI status: Check Condition
(da0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): SCSI sense: ILLEGAL REQUEST asc:21.0 (Logical block address out of range)
(da0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): Error 22, Unretryable error
g_vfs_done():ufs/pfSense[READ(offset=567148544, length=131072)]error = 5

./usr/bin/… : Can’t unlink already-existing object
/lib/libcrypto.so.7: truncated input
Tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors.
Exit status: 1

So what do you think the issue is here? Flaky USB stick? Flaky SSD? Misconfiguration? Bad formatting? I verified my image checksum after download and it seems to be OK.

[reinderien]

I suspect that it may be due to the way I'm writing out the USB image. I'm writing it from Ubuntu using dd:

# dd if=/home/gtoombs/Downloads/pfSense-CE-memstick-2.3.4-RELEASE-amd64.img of=/dev/sdb bs=65536 iflag=noatime status=progress
10832+1 records in
10832+1 records out
709894144 bytes (710 MB, 677 MiB) copied, 68.1981 s, 10.4 MB/s

After, disktype shows:

# disktype /dev/sdb

--- /dev/sdb
Block device, size 14.94 GiB (16039018496 bytes)
FreeBSD boot loader (i386 boot1 at sector 0)
FreeBSD boot loader (i386 boot2/BTX 1.02 at sector 2)
BSD disklabel (at sector 1), 8 partitions
Partition a: 677.0 MiB (709894144 bytes, 1386512 sectors from 0)
  Type 7 (4.2BSD fast file system)
  Includes the disklabel and boot code
  UFS2 file system, 64 KiB offset, little-endian
    Volume name "pfSense" (in superblock)
Partition c: 677.0 MiB (709894144 bytes, 1386512 sectors from 0)
  Type 0 (Unused)

fdisk shows:

Disk /dev/sdb: 15 GiB, 16039018496 bytes, 31326208 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x90909090

Device     Boot Start   End Sectors  Size Id Type
/dev/sdb4  *        0 49999   50000 24.4M a5 FreeBSD

This seems wrong, because the size is definitely supposed to be more than 24 MB.

When I mount and ls:

# mount -r -t ufs -o ufstype=ufs2 /dev/sdb /mnt/stick/
# ls /mnt/stick
bin   cf    conf.default  dev      etc   lib      media  pkgs  rescue  sbin     sys  usr
boot  conf  COPYRIGHT     distrib  home  libexec  mnt    proc  root    scripts  tmp  var
# ls /mnt/stick/distrib
ls: reading directory '.': Input/output error

So something is really fishy with this filesystem. What am I doing wrong here?

[reinderien]

Yet more fishiness:

# fsck.ufs -f /dev/sdb
** /dev/sdb

CANNOT READ BLK: 128
CONTINUE? [yn] y

THE FOLLOWING DISK SECTORS COULD NOT BE READ: 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143,

[reinderien]

Solved it by using a different USB stick. It's unfortunate, but oh well.