Smoothwall Problems

By Sikh
in Smart Home, Network & Security

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Grand Master

Sikh

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Posted

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?

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Grand Master

The Evil Overlord

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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.

Grand Master

Sikh

Posted
  • Author
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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

Grand Master

+BudMan MVC

Posted
  • MVC
Posted

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 ;)

Grand Master

Sikh

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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.

Grand Master

+BudMan MVC

Posted
  • MVC
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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

Grand Master

HawkMan

Posted
Posted
  On 14/01/2013 at 01:16, Sikh said:

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.

Grand Master

n_K

Posted
Posted

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.

Grand Master

+BudMan MVC

Posted
  • MVC
Posted

^ 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 ;)

Grand Master

Sikh

Posted
  • Author
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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.

Grand Master

n_K

Posted
Posted

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)

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