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    Pfsense on a CF in a standard PC

    Scheduled Pinned Locked Moved Problems Installing or Upgrading pfSense Software
    6 Posts 4 Posters 2.0k Views
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    • D
      Dominik321
      last edited by

      Hello! I wanted to install pfsense on an old PC but it won't boot. The PC finds the CF as a IDE but when trying to boot the display stays black. What should i do?

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      • dotdashD
        dotdash
        last edited by

        IDE>CF adapters can have issues with some PCs. I've had some luck changing the IDE settings in the BIOS to slower speeds. In my experience, some adapters do not work with some PCs.

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        • D
          Dominik321
          last edited by

          but i tried it with 2 different pc's…

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          • stephenw10S
            stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
            last edited by

            CF DMA support is broken in FreeBSD so disable that in the bios for starters.
            Since CF cards do not actually have heads and cylinders the drive geometry is often detected incorrectly by the bios. Sometimes it will boot if you set it manually however it can be hard to determine the correct settings, if you're lucky the card manufacturer may list them.
            You don't actually need the correct settings since once it's booting the bios settings are ignored anyway. You just need to find a setting where the bios code points the cpu at the bootloader.

            Steve

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            • D
              Dominik321
              last edited by

              But this one is the right version, or? pfSense-2.0-RC1-2g-i386-20110226-1633-nanobsd.img.gz
              And i don't have to edit something? Just write it with physdiskwrite, or?

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              • D
                dreamslacker
                last edited by

                Did you hook up a serial cable and use terminal?
                The embedded variant doesn't use a GUI on the machine itself.

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