Sikh Posted January 13, 2013 Share Posted January 13, 2013 So I wanted to give smoothwall a try. I've been using pfsense for about 2 years now and I love it. But I just thought "hey why not try something different". I went to go set up smoothwall on my firewall box, went through the setup, installed to a blank formatted hard drive and when my firewall box reboots, "missing boot drive". So I then reformatted it, installed pfsense to the same drive, rebooted and boot, Pfsense boots. I reinstall smoothwall, reboot, missing boot device again. I take the hard drive out dock it to my desktop and I see all the 4 partitions the installation disc made and all the files. I then burn another disc, on another machine with a freshly downloaded i386 image of smoothwall. Reformat the docked hard drive, put it back in my firewall box, pop the new smoothwall disc in, boot up go thru setup, install to hard drive, and reboot. Oh look missing boot device. I've done everything to make sure its booting of the hard drive but when it comes to smoothwall it wont, as soon as i put pfsense on that hard drive it will. Any ideas? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Evil Overlord Posted January 13, 2013 Share Posted January 13, 2013 Naa Duro Naa Darao Does the disc need to load at bootup? My guess, tho it is only a guess, is, you may have burned the disc too fast, try burning the disc at he slowest speed possible allowed by your burner, this usually fixed bootloader discs for me at least. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sikh Posted January 13, 2013 Author Share Posted January 13, 2013 The disc is fine, its when its trying to boot off the hard drive. The first disc I made at full speed, second disc I made at 4-8x. Slowest speed i could do. Still nothing Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Evil Overlord Posted January 13, 2013 Share Posted January 13, 2013 Sorry, that's about all I had Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
farmeunit Posted January 13, 2013 Share Posted January 13, 2013 I had the same issue a while back, but I don't remember the fix. It was quite a while back. Sorry, not much help. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+BudMan MVC Posted January 13, 2013 MVC Share Posted January 13, 2013 I have not played with smoothwall for years - but its linux based is it not.. Where are you installing grub I would assume? Let me grab a copy and take a look Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
n_K Posted January 13, 2013 Share Posted January 13, 2013 It's either using syslinux or grub, what's easiest is to boot up that or another live cd and manually install the bootloader. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sikh Posted January 13, 2013 Author Share Posted January 13, 2013 Its asks me to install grub and it installs it on the same hard drive. I just wanted to make sure its a possibility that its the boot loader because i can definitely spend some time manually installing it. I just didn't want to waste that time and have it not be that. We all have done that enough so its nice to see if it could be anything else. Sad part is. For testing purposes i installed it on esxi and boom it rebooted fine. Install it on actual hardware and it freaks the **** out. @Budman: if you find anything interesting Lt me know. Thanks for the help guys Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
n_K Posted January 13, 2013 Share Posted January 13, 2013 Did you have an existing MBR on the hard drive, grub/windows/syslinux/other? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+BudMan MVC Posted January 14, 2013 MVC Share Posted January 14, 2013 I got sucked into cleaning up my computer room today - it was just trashed ;) So have not had time to play with it, but if your saying it boots up fine off your VM, I have to assume since your disk was using pfsense before which is freebsd that your having an issue with your bootloader on the install of smoothwall. Make sure you overwrite the bootloader from pfsense and you should be good. You will just be back to pfsense in a few days anyway ;) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
farmeunit Posted January 14, 2013 Share Posted January 14, 2013 Now that Budman mentions it, that sounds like what my problem was before. I believe I had used another distro before installed Smoothwall. I had to clear that out and it worked fine. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sikh Posted January 14, 2013 Author Share Posted January 14, 2013 I knew if I just overwrite pfsense that it would be a problem, so I formatted the hard drive before installing smoothwall everytime because I knew I would have conflicts if I didnt. So everytime I installed smoothwall, the drives been COMPLETELY empty. I think I need to get a live cd after I install smoothwall and install grub manually. @Budman: Probably. I love having pfsense at work, and I know I will be back to it at home, but Its something I just want to tinker with. You know how it is ;). If we didnt tinker, our lives would be boring and we wouldnt be techs. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+BudMan MVC Posted January 14, 2013 MVC Share Posted January 14, 2013 tinker all you want via vm ;) And how did you format it? I doubt you wiped out freebsd bootloader with a format. It can be a bit tricky.. So should of been quite clear if it was still booting the freebsd loader vs grub, when you booted the box? Can't you just do something like dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1 Change it to whatever your drive is - maybe yours is sda? Or wipe out the whole zero track dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=63 Shoot just zero the whole thing ;) dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda You should be able to do that from booting your fav live or rescue cd/usb Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
HawkMan Posted January 14, 2013 Share Posted January 14, 2013 I knew if I just overwrite pfsense that it would be a problem, so I formatted the hard drive before installing smoothwall everytime because I knew I would have conflicts if I didnt. So everytime I installed smoothwall, the drives been COMPLETELY empty. I think I need to get a live cd after I install smoothwall and install grub manually. @Budman: Probably. I love having pfsense at work, and I know I will be back to it at home, but Its something I just want to tinker with. You know how it is ;). If we didnt tinker, our lives would be boring and we wouldnt be techs. I had som issue when changing Linux distros before where even completely erasing the drive and partitions during install, would carry over bugs and crap. The only way to get it right was to first clean the drive completely, then reboot completely, then start the install. Sikh 1 Share Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sikh Posted January 14, 2013 Author Share Posted January 14, 2013 Hawkman: how else would i complete reformat the drive? I even 1 pass formatted it. I can do 3 passes doesn't bother me. I have plenty of 80gb sata drives sitting around. Just trying to figure out how formatting it with gpart via terminal didn't work. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
n_K Posted January 14, 2013 Share Posted January 14, 2013 As budman said formatting won't erase the bootloader unless you format the whole drive. If you want to clean up a drive so it's not been deleted but it's quick and fast then load up a linux distro, open fdisk or parted, delete all visible partitions and write changes then use the command budman gave dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=63 And go back to installing and it should do it fine. The reason having a previous bootloader can cause problems is lots of script installers see there is a bootloader already and it presumes it's doing an update of an old version to a new major version or you're adding it to an existing bootloader that you don't want overwritten (multiboot) so it doesn't bother creating a new bootloader. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+BudMan MVC Posted January 15, 2013 MVC Share Posted January 15, 2013 ^ exactly how were you formatting it? As stated above deleting partitions and creating new ones, or just formatting the existing partitions have nothing to do with the bootloader that might be on there. This is not a windows install that will overwrite the bootloader on install ;) Linux and bsds don't assume just because your installing them that they should overwrite an existing bootloader.. You would have to specifically do that! Now some installs might ask, etc. But others that have been trimmed down to just install a specific distro might not. Wipe the zero track and you should be fine on install of whatever new OS you install - as you "tinker" with different OSes you will find this out. Or just use VM for your tinkering and then you don't ever have to worry about it, because you can just create a clean new virtual disk for all your different installs ;) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sikh Posted January 15, 2013 Author Share Posted January 15, 2013 If i used VMS then i would never experience this. First time i formatted entire disk via mac os disk utility. Next part in mint. Third time (yesterday) wipe disc bootable disc 1 pass. I can definitely low level this drive. I didn't think i would ever have to. But i have to say I'm glad I ran into this problem and i love dd so i don't have a problem using it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
n_K Posted January 15, 2013 Share Posted January 15, 2013 You don't need to low level format it - that's just overkill. All you need to do is overwrite the MBR and partition table! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sikh Posted January 15, 2013 Author Share Posted January 15, 2013 @n_K: how would i make sure that i have formatted the MBR / partition tables? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
n_K Posted January 16, 2013 Share Posted January 16, 2013 dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/XXX bs=512 count=63 Where XXX is your drive, hda or sda or hdb or sdb, etc. (Make sure you get the right drive and it has no numbers on the end, numbers on the end like sda1 indicate a partition, not the drive itself) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sikh Posted January 16, 2013 Author Share Posted January 16, 2013 Ok i know how to do it via dd. I thought you were going to tell me a different way. Sorry about that. I will report back sometime this week letting you guys know how it works. Work will be busy tomorrow and hopefully that's it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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