Watchguard Firebox wont boot on internal CF Card
-
There are at least two motherboard variants in the X-e boxes and they look like they're different manufacturers but I assume made to the same spec. They use the same BIOS.
The failure to boot is due to some problem with the recognised geometry of the card. Since the CF cards are only pretending to be an IDE harddrive they can present almost any geometry. The card I used to create the FreeDOS image was 16MB. It has booted in everything I've tried it in so perhaps try to get a very small card if you can.
I've just had to disconnect my test box as I'm going away for a few weeks so I can't check right now but from memory the LCD only shows 'Missing Operating System' if it has tried to boot correctly but for some other reason is not able to. If it fails to boot because of a card geometry problem it just says 'Booting OS…' and nothing happens. That implies that either there is no OS on the card or the card isn't showing up at all for some reason. Does it boot the Watchguard OS? I assume you're not hearing the three beeps when trying to boot the FreeDOS image?Steve
-
Hi Steve,
Sorry I didn't mean Missing Operating System came up on the LCD on the front of the firebox, I meant I plugged in a VGA Graphics Card into the PCI slot and thats whats coming up on the monitor. The box does boot into the Watchguard OS. The card does work for Windows 98 Boot Disk and FreeDOS, When I have a card that doesn't have anything on it then I get a Disk boot error, with your image on the CF Card I get Missing Operating System…
Would it be difficult to create my own version of FreeDos? I believe my biggest issue is I'm not aware of how to get FreeDOS to allow you to connect over Console. Is that the code inside of AutoExec.bat? And I think a few days ago when I tried it it said I had to press enter at the boot screen? I will check again.
Thanks again for your help.
BTW, I just wired up my Firebox and its running great!
-
Creating the FreeDOS image is relatively easy. I think the hardest part was finding some way of writing it to the disk initially. I forget exactly whay tool I used in the end but there was plenty of info in forums etc. Switching to the serial console is easy, I did it with a line in autoexec.bat as you suggested. Have a look in my image.
Writing this from the airport so probably won't be able to reply to anything for while. Pretty sure they don 't have mid-atlantic wifi yet (or it's rediculously expensive!).
Steve
-
Nevermind, I got it all working, 8)
Turns out I had to use the original CF Card for it to work,
Every card I wrote to would not boot FreeDOS on the Firebox but would boot it on a real PC.
I talked to my co worker and he said it would be okay to try, I made a backup of his firebox os and then applied it to a 256MB cf Card I owned which errored out saying not enough sectors
even though they were the same card, I then tried putting the image on a bigger card 512mb. I couldn't believe it but that actually booted up in the firebox.
After that I knew I had a good working backup in case anything went wrong so I went ahead and pushed FreeDOS to the original CF Card and the firebox booted it up,
I was then stuck for an hour with issues of "ERROR READING FROM DEVICE COM1 Write Fault"
After searching the warehouse for an old Serial Cable I ended up trying 4 different Serial Cables before one actually worked.
I was having trouble with performing a Backup of the bios so I ended up just typing the code out in the autoexec.bat file and putting pause afterwards.
I seen the bios got backed up quickly, I then typed out the command for bios 8 in the autoexec.bat file and before you knew it I was running pfSense.
Thanks again for all your help!
-
Nice one. :)
Having a serial cable that doesn't support hardware flow control can really give you a hard time.Steve
