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I want to recycle a 2010 MacBook pro 17" for a temporary pfSense router. The laptop will not recognize CD/DVD despite having super dvd drive. When that didn't work, I tried the memstick with VGA...I was able to select the bootable flash drive but then had issued with the VGA (boot up for a few seconds, then expected the SSD to be already formatted with UFS or ZFS with a pool, it seems. This MacBook pro doesn't have a serial port...so memstick serial wouldn't seem to be compatible either.
Why the memstick cannot have like DVI or even HDMI? I cannot pass this issue to continue the pfSense installation! what's the fix? I am eager to get rid of my current HP Pavillion a6242n pfSense machine and have a 2011 Mac Mini quad i7 on its way. This post by Ironman confirmed pfSense installation workable on Mac Mini: https://forum.netgate.com/topic/136242/resolved-options-for-mac-mini-pfsense-system
it seems it should work for MacBook pro with non-retina display also!
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Without any additional driver the output used would probably be selected via some key combination.
What do you actually see when you try to boot?This maybe?
https://forum.netgate.com/topic/115408/installation-kernel-panic-on-driver-loadSteve
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@stephenw10 Thank you Stephen for responding. I have changed my plan as mentioned in the first post and have received the Mac Mini server 2011. I am really going overkill with dual 128GB SSD and 16GB RAM; however, the idea behind is that this pfSense machine is an aesthetically pleasing for a five year plan despite looking like a massive overkill today. I'll be starting a new thread on that later.
What occurred during the installation attempt was erratic behavior of the screen, showing for a few minutes then going black in a back and forth cycle as if the MacBook pro hardware were saying it's a high definition display so what is this VGA!
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The real issue had to do with EFI. I experienced the same with the Mac Mini Server 2011 and had to end up installing pfSense from a CD. It might be using the DD command in Terminal on Macs some how not creating an EFI boot partition. I downloaded Etcher for Macs and created an Ubuntu USB boot disk to put on the HP Pavillion a6242N to give away, and it worded flawlessly. So, this coming weekend when I'll be back home, I create a pfSense 2.4.4 USB stick to see whether that works.
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