My IDE CF not recognized by FreeBSD-6.0

shavano

I'm running pfSense LiveCD on a Mini-ITX. First of all, it works great so many thanks to the developers for putting this package together. I'll soon replace my FreeBSD/IPFW internal bridging firewall and my external Linksys/OpenWRT with it.

However, I've been trying for two days to get pfSense running from the CF with zero luck and I can't find anything that points me remotely close to a solution. Neither the basic FreeBSD-6.0 installer nor the installation feature of the pfSense LiveCD recognizes that the CF exists. Both claim some variant of "no disk is available to install to". When I use the embedded pfSense image, it boots to the point where it wants to mount the file system and fails with the "mountroot" prompt. Entering "?" at that point returns blank. I've also tried several of the images from the Hacom site with the same general results.

Yet, it's not broken hardware – I can put M0n0wall on the CF using their generic PC image for CF and it boots up and works just fine. I was able to install pfSense from LiveCD onto USB flash, but this system won't boot from ~~flash~~ USB so that's not really a solution.

Does anyone have any idea what could be causing this and how to fix it? The CF I'm using is a SanDisk Ultra II 512MB.

BTW, with just the default ruleset, iperf measures 75Mbps through it. It has 256MB of memory and is a 500Mhz Eden (I think) and utilization never shows much above a couple percent – that's its reported short-term average; I'm not sure where it peaks during transfers, but I've seen TOP report only as low as 85% idle and that was during the iperf tests.

hoba

Check out if you find something here that you haven't tried out yet:
http://wiki.pfsense.com/wikka.php?wakka=BootTroubleShooting

Also can you try another cf-card? some medias have funny geometries that might cause issues.

shavano

Thanks for the tip, but none of that works. I tried several different setting on the drive geometries (CHS and LBA, Auto, Manual, different CHS settings), and I tried turning off UDMA.

It just doesn't recognize the CF at all. There's no "ad0" in /dev, so neither of the commands work at all. The drive is detected by the BIOS and by the version of FreeBSD in m0n0wall, just not by the 6.1 in pfSense and not by 6.0-RELEASE.

I've tried a 512MB SanDisk Ultra and a 256MB Kingston (standard). Same results with both – m0n0wall works fine, not detected at all by pfSense.

I don't really understand the boot process but when I use one of the embedded versions it works until it gets to the point where it wants to mount "/" and fails. How can it be working up to there?

sullrich

@shavano:

It just doesn't recognize the CF at all. There's no "ad0" in /dev, so neither of the commands work at all. The drive is detected by the BIOS and by the version of FreeBSD in m0n0wall, just not by the 6.1 in pfSense and not by 6.0-RELEASE.

This is a FreeBSD issue then. You will be better suited to raise the issue on a FreeBSD related list so that it can be possibly fixed.