Soekris net6501 installs fine but does not boot

ghachey · Jan 31, 2015, 8:34 AM

Hi,

New to pfSense and BSDs, coming from Linux to try this out. I tried installing the memstick serial release 2.2 i386 (integrity tested with hash) on my board which had been otherwise running Linux fine for months. It's got the latest 1.41c BIOS. I can run in Live mode and do the installation process without a problem as far as I can tell. However, when I try to boot from the target drive (a Intel 30GB MLC mSATA SSD) it simply reboots. To be more precise, it boots up to the point where I see boot options with 80 (hex code of my mSATA) as default. But if I press enter or wait for the timeout to boot the default it just reboots and repeat the process all over. It seems it can't pick up the boot loader or something like that.

I've search a fair bit and could not get a working solution. I'd really like to test drive pfSense so help would be really appreciated.

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GH

DickB · Feb 1, 2015, 9:12 AM

@ghachey
I have exactly the same problem with a net6501-50. Unfortunately I don't have the time to investigate it at the moment.
What I discovered up till now is that the boot software has changed and that may conflict with the 6501 firmware somewhere.

But if you first install 2.1.5 and then upgrade to 2.2 it will work.

Hope that helps for now.

Dick

ghachey · Feb 1, 2015, 10:29 AM

Thank you @DickB. Yes, I was going to go that route. It's good to know this is not an isolated problem I'm facing alone. I'll do this and report back here.

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GH

ghachey · Feb 7, 2015, 6:27 AM

Yes, 2.15 installs fine. I have not yet upgraded to 2.2 from the 2.15 install though.

Thanks,

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GH

ghachey · Mar 30, 2015, 3:44 AM

Hi,

I upgraded to 2.2 from the Web UI after a successful installation of 2.1.5 and it works. I've got pfSense running on my net6501 and I'm really impressed so far with this project.

However, out of curiosity I tried the latest 2.2.1 release to see if this problem is still present–and it is. A USB installation using the memstick serial image does not work on the popular net6501 boards. Details at the beginning of this thread.

I think this deserves a bug report. I'll prepare one soon unless someone advises me otherwise.

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GH