Watchguard X750e running pfSense on a SATA hard drive easily with about $10 mods

[harveje]

well amazon prime to the rescue… but in the mean time I rigged a usb to ide setup and installed pfsense on on old  ide drive I found, loaded it, rebooted laptop to verify, removed cabling, added the dell connector and fitted the ide into the watchguard, slid cf card out, booted to bios, set disk in bios, and it will only boot up to the i/o's box. reset cyl in bios to 2, rebooted and same issue, set udma to auto, still stops at the same point..
Then I had to leave for work so I'll mess again tonight.
between this box, a new voip box, a friggin win 10 desktop that crashes and configuring a kodi-pi box my head hurts...

[harveje]

well another pickle..
Finally got the ide to boot
toshiba 60gb with latest pf release
while booting it goes into the mountroot> routine
bios is set to manual, chs, 2 heads if I put it in auto detect it will not boot
drive is ada0
I've tried the ufs:/dev/….... that I could find in the forum but it will not get past that point
tried safe mode, verbose boot, etc..
Any ideas?
I'm running bios 6 or 7  checking now
Thanks,

[DeLorean]

@harveje:

Any ideas?
I'm running bios 6 or 7  checking now
Thanks,

Try with the Bios 8.1 , then you have ACPI for Cpu temp readings
and the CF card or Hard drive will be recognized automatically by the Bios without manual settings.

Good luck.

Grtz
DeLorean

[harveje]

Bingo…
That was the missing link.
Loaded 8.1
re set bios and she has booted twice so far straight to the console with an old ide drive and that dell connector
Man the hd makes a Big diff in load up time.
Now to get the lcd and fan control back working and my ports fixed..
AwEsOmE...
I guess I'm a total geek, I had a great running box with the CF card but could not stand that ide adapter not being used...

Thank to ALL.

[vizi0n]

@DeLorean:

Try with the Bios 8.1 , then you have ACPI for Cpu temp readings
and the CF card or Hard drive will be recognized automatically by the Bios without manual settings.

Strangely it works fine on mine with b7. Maybe something else comes into play somewhere. Any difference between ACPI from B7 and B8.1?

[harveje]

Actually I think I had 6 loaded, because I did not have a 7 file in by bios folder.
And I was not sure 8.1 took because it just went back to the prompt

The drive I have fits great and even has foam padding around it from the old application. I'll post a pic tonight.

I am beyond tickled.
Is there an easy way to load up the fan controller and lcd fix? Would a full backup import those items?
I think every upgrade wipes them out.

Thanks again

[vizi0n]

For the fans I use the script described here (option A) : https://www.hexhound.com/quiet-the-fan-on-your-pfsense-watchguard-firewall/

It allows you to set a threshold temperature and the fan adjusts automatically

For the LCD fix, what do you mean? I'm using lcdproc-dev and it works fine on my box, and when you backup your settings it should automatically reinstall the packages when you restore from a backup. At least, it did on mine

[harveje]

Yep, that's where I got my info last time, got to watch that vi command line tho…
I finally had to copy everything into a txt doc then copy and paste into pf

[harveje]

Well the ide drive fit and works so well I'm just going to use it and make a copy on a sata drive for a backup.
Updating the Bios was the key factor. Boot up time is way faster too.
Thanks to All

[arganox]

Hi all,

Sorry for resurrecting this thread but I figured it would be nice to keep the info together.
I did perform this mod and all is running and booting ok.

Though I did notice some strange errors in the logs when the devices is running:

(ada0:ata0:0:0:0): READ_DMA. ACB: c8 00 97 9d 6f 49 00 00 00 00 80 00
(ada0:ata0:0:0:0): CAM status: ATA Status Error
(ada0:ata0:0:0:0): ATA status: 51 (DRDY SERV ERR), error: 84 (ICRC ABRT )
(ada0:ata0:0:0:0): RES: 51 84 c6 9d 6f 09 09 00 00 50 00
(ada0:ata0:0:0:0): Retrying command

BIOS (v8) settings:
IDE master is set to HDD
Both IDE channel and Access mode are on auto

IDE primary Master PIO and UDMA are set to Auto
IDE HDD Block mode and IDE DMA transfer access are enabled

I think the later two settings are posing these issues though not sure.
Could anyone tell me how to fix this? or give me some pointers?

Regards,

Arganox

[stephenw10]

That's using a SATA drive with an adapter or an old IDE drive?

Steve

[arganox]

Steve,

Thanks for the reply.

I did indeed use a SATA drive with the same connectors as Vizi0n did.
Forgot to mention that tiny detail  ::)

[stephenw10]

Hmm, I would guess that's some quirk of the adapter maybe. Assuming the drive itself is good.

Steve

[kobzar]

Wery thanks for this manual.
I was repeat it in myself. And now all is fine.

[fibrewire]

@vizi0n:

@fibrewire:

You could have just gone with a Microdrive  :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microdrive

http://www.ebay.com/itm/230860368181

Yes I could, but due to the rarity, and possibility of cheap chinese knockoff, I prefer going the regular hard drive way. And it was cheaper to get 2 adapters for less than $10 vs getting a microdrive for $15-20 since I already had the hard drive. The turnaround is also quicker if I ever need to replace it.

I just wanted to add that 14 months later, the Microdrive swap has worked really well and is completely idiot-proof. I have a stack of drives on my desk here from that initial buy I made in December 2015 and they are all working great. Probably why Apple elected to use them in their line of iPods so many years ago. They are definitely not counterfeit, there are millions of them ready to go into a landfill and at $2/each its a headache-free way to get hard disk performance into a Watchguard appliance. Super low-power too, if the power goes out and the Watchguard appliance needs to run on a UPS.

[stephenw10]

Hard to argue with $2.  ;)

[DeLorean]

You can use a 2.5" Sata SSD connected to a Sata controller card,
thats connected with a PCI-E 1x flex riser cable to the PCI-E 4x slot on the motherboard.
The differents in navigating speed trough the web UI is like day and night compared to a embedded version run from CF.
I have a x750e thats converted like this, and runs great.

Grtz
DeLorean

[kobzar]

I was do it!
But i have a few different moments.
First, after install i doesn't normally booted. pfsense 2.3.3
I was stuck after LAN interfaces is initialized.
So, i going to boot promt, insert
set console="comconsole"
boot

After this i setup my network interfaces and next reboot was fine.
I use 320 Sata drive with two partition / and swap without any problem.
Thanks for the manual.

[DeLorean]

The x750e with 32Gb SSD connected to a Sata Controller card conversion that i made a few months ago.

Grtz
DeLorean

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[vizi0n]

@DeLorean:

The x750e with 32Gb SSD connected to a Sata Controller card conversion that i made a few months ago.

Grtz
DeLorean

That is a very nice mod!