Install to external drive via vmware won't boot on hardware with version 1.2.3
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Hi all,
We use pfSense in a small office, and everything we do is based on internet access. Before the release version of 1.2.3 I'd installed pfsense to 2 external USB hard drives and restored the configuration in a vmware virtual machine (RC2).Whenever we have a failure, I simply swap the drives, then assign the nics on our physical router to the WAN LAN, OPT1 (DMS) and OPT2(WAN2). This has always worked very well, and I have never had more than 5 minutes of downtime during a drive failure. I recently downloaded and installed v 1.2.3 on our hot backup with the intention of switching them over this morning. Unfortunately, the 1.2.3 does not boot properly when I plug my drive in my physical router. Here is my procedure for installing on a vmware instance for creating my external drives.
1. Boot from CD
2. Select any 2 interfaces (I've defined 4 in the vm) for my LAN and WAN. They're irrelevant b/c they're re-assigned when I plug my disk into my physical router
3. Select option 99. I get the info message "Vmware detected, the installer will make changes to this installation".
4. Select easy install and install to my USB drive.Is there a boot option I can supply to disable this check in step 3? This procedure worked with previous releases, so I think the vmware mods are causing the issue.
Thanks,
Todd -
#3 has been the same for years (long before 1.2.3, I believe 1.2 release was the first), and those options also work fine on physical hardware. You can delete /boot/loader.conf to remove them, but I doubt if that's related.
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Please elaborate on does not boot properly. How far does the startup get? What does the startup report?
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I get the initial bootloader selection with only one option, pfsense. When pfSense tries to boot you normally get the "spinning" icon based on the slash, pipe and dash. The icon performs a couple of iterations, my HD light shows access, and then the boot simply freezes. I've left it for 30 minutes, and nothing happens. I'm using an external USB hd. I've tried plugging it into a powered hub just in case it were a hardware power issue, but nothing happens. I can load the same OS on a USB stick (which I tried after my initial post) and everything works well. It's VERY strange that an external USB 2.0 drive won't boot, but an external USB 2.0 memory stick will. Both were installed with exactly the same procedure via the installer in vmware.
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Some time ago I bought a number of USB adapters for note book drives. Some worked with FreeBSD and some didn't. I discovered in the FreeBSD sources there was a table for USB devices with "quirks" and code work arounds for the quirks. The devices that worked used a different chip than the devices that didn't and there was no "quirk" entry for either device.
Suggestion: You try to read the whole external hard drive on a "bare metal" FreeBSD system by a command like```
dd if=/dev/da2 of=/dev/null bs=65536