TechTip: pfSense Fails to Boot
July 24th, 2007 by Alex RobarI had a problem recently with pfSense installation. The installer would boot from the LiveCD without issue, and would install without throwing any error messages at me. Upon reboot, I would get quickly scrolling hex code, or “GRUB loading… Please wait.” Obviously neither of these things helped me boot my system. If you’re having these problems, see below for my solutions.
- Scrolling hex code:
- I’ve got four letters for you: S A T A. The IDE drive I had in my latest install failed SMART checks, so I popped in a spare SATA drive. Sure, the installer detects it and installs to it, but it damn sure wouldn’t boot from it. Check the pfSense hardware guide for compatible disk controllers.
- GRUB loading… Please wait:
- Dive into the exciting world of s/M play! Seriously, set your master and slave switches properly. Better yet, put your devices on entirely different IDE channels if you can. I found that while everything would install with the IDE drive set to “single master” and the optical drive set to “slave”, the system wouldn’t boot. Even when the IDE drive was switched to “master with slave” there were still boot problems. Only when I moved each device to its own IDE channel and set each up as “single master” did my problems go away.
Was all that likely just my particular hardware? Yep. But if you hit these problems, try the suggestions above and see if you can’t get anywhere.
AR
Posted in TechTips |
August 13th, 2007 at 2:51 pm
Setting a IDE drive as single master with a slave present will surely give you problems. Try to set it as master(with slave present) or CS (Cable Select) if your hardware is of newer date then it should work fine.
CS is allways recomended. And having a single device on each controller gives you better performance. Also note that when dealing with drive master/slave issues you MUST follow the standards, meaning if you use CS mode the middle connector on the cable is allways master and the one on the end is slave. When using a Master/Slave setup you need to place the device set to master on the end of the cable. In rare cases you need to set one drive to CS and one to slave/master, the CS drive will have to be placed acordingly. If you have one device jumpered as master it will have to stay on the middle of the cable while the CS drive needs to be on the end (to become slave). And if you jumper one device slave then the CS drive will have to be placed in the middle (to become master). If all of this fails then your MB/BIOS is in serious need of replacement/updating.
Good luck
August 13th, 2007 at 3:10 pm
Hi Espen:
Oh, I know that SM on an IDE controller with two devices won’t ever work - blame the hardware installer in this instance. My point was more that it installed properly/without errors, so I figured the hardware was all correct. Only after a bunch of software troubleshooting did I take a look back at the HW to find that the original installer didn’t set things up properly.
Cheers,
AR