Loading pfsense for D2500CCE using a Apple products

[hendersonmc]

I have a D2500CCE with 8GB memory and a 1 TB SSHD that I am trying to load with pfsense 2.1.5 for the first time. Initially, I downloaded the .iso for the CD and burned it using my Mac running OS X Yosemite via the Disk Utility and my Apple Superdrive. I checked out the CD on my Mac and everything looked fine. (Same as mounting the .iso file as a virtual volume)

Crossing my fingers, I unplugged the Superdrive and plugged it into the D2500CCE. The BIOS reported everything looking good, including seeing the Superdrive as an optical device, but the boot fails after that without ever spinning up the CD.

Next I looked at trying to use a memory sick for loading pfSense-memstick-2.1.5-RELEASE-i386.img, but the Disk Utility program does not known how to deal with the .img format (it prefers another format with an .dmg file extension).

I even considered using the dd utility from the command line to transfer the image, but ran into permissions errors, even using my administrative account (which is different than the root owner of the file system).

If anyone can point me to how to overcome any of these approaches, or has another approach that would work, I would be extremely grateful.

[robi]

@hendersonmc:

I even considered using the dd utility from the command line to transfer the image, but ran into permissions errors, even using my administrative account (which is different than the root owner of the file system).

That shoud be the way to go imho, what were exctly the errors you mentioned?

[hendersonmc]

bash-3.2$ mount
/dev/disk0s2 on / (hfs, local, journaled)
devfs on /dev (devfs, local, nobrowse)
map -hosts on /net (autofs, nosuid, automounted, nobrowse)
map auto_home on /home (autofs, automounted, nobrowse)
/dev/disk1s1 on /Volumes/UNTITLED (msdos, local, nodev, nosuid, noowners)

bash-3.2$ ls -al /dev/disk1s1
brw-r–---  1 root  operator    1,  5 Nov  2 07:28 /dev/disk1s1

bash-3.2$ dd if=pfSense-memstick-2.1.5-RELEASE-i386.img of=/dev/disk1s1
dd: /dev/disk1s1: Permission denied

[stephenw10]

I have almost no OSX experience but…..
Try writing to the device directly (/dev/disk1) not a slice on it.

Steve

[hendersonmc]

Wouldn't that wipe out the partition map of the device?

[stephenw10]

Yes but that's ok because the image you're writing contains the partition/slice info. It's a raw image of the drive.
Unless of course you have other partitions on disk1 you need to keep!

Steve