PfSense won't boot after installation

Jakobud

I have been running pfSense off the LiveCD for the past week to test it and stuff. I seem to like it, so I used the #99 choice of installing pfSense to the server.

I choose the Quick/Easy Install, answered all the questions.

Now when the machine rebooted I get this:

F1     FreeBSD

boot:     F1
\

And thats it. It just sits there like that. Did I do something wrong?

jimp

Sometimes that can happen when there is some peculiar interaction between the kernel, BIOS, and/or disk controller.

Try some of the suggestions here:

http://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Boot_Troubleshooting

Jakobud

Hmmm I don't see anything on that page that relates to my problem. Is there something I'm missing? I have no idea where to start here.

Don't forget, I'm able to boot to the LiveCD just fine.

jimp

How do you know they don't relate to your problem if you haven't actually tried any of them?

Jakobud

I guess nothing on that page describes what I'm seeing… I don't get any of the errors referred to on that page.

jimp

You should just go down the list and try them one by one, but you can skip the ones that mention ALIX or NanoBSD.

Jakobud

Well I didn't have any luck with the suggestions on that page.

I read about similar issues people had on the forum and their solution was to use 1.2.2. So I got the pfSense 1.2.2. LiveCD running, did the install and I got farther this time.

The installer asked me a lot more questions than with 1.2.3. I answered everything with pretty much whatever it recommended, along the lines of boot blocks etc. I have a single SATA HDD 160G, I partitioned and formatted it as the installer suggested, essentially using the whole disk.

After rebooting finally, I got this:

F1: FreeBSD

Default: F1

error 1 lba 293178511
No /boot/loader

pfSense/i386 boot
Default: 0:ad(0,a)/boot/kernel/kernel
boot:
error 1 lba 293178511
No /boot/kernel/kernel

and it repeats itself anytime I press Enter.

So whats the deal now? The installer didn't install a boot loader? At the end of the install it asked me:

You may now wish to install bootblocks on one or more disks. If you already have a boot manager installed, you can skip this step (but you may have to configure your boot manager spearately.) If you wish to install pfSense on a disk other than your first disk, you will need to put the bootblock on at least your first disk and the pfSense disk.

So basically, it was saying, that if I didn't have a boot manager (loader?), to have the installer install the boot manager for me, which I went ahead and did. So why is it saying there is no boot loader now that I've restarted?

Thanks for the help. This is not very straightforward and its frusterating.

Jakobud

Well in one last attempt, I went back to the 1.2.3 LiveCD and did the install after the bootup. Instead this time I went through the custom install instead of the Quick/Easy install. Apparently the quick install didn't do some things right the first time around, because I got better results when going with the custom install route.

Here is where I got stuck this time. This is after the install and reboot without the CD in the drive:

It just sits there stuck. Can anyone help me?

Jakobud

Whew, got it to work now, by not choosing "Packet Mode" during the bootblock creation part of the installation.