pfSense

I've seen some problems installing pfSense 2 on previously used disks.

In one case I had a disk which just minutes before had a working 1.2.3 on it and the there was a geometry mismatch (dunno why) between the detected geometry and the label, and the install failed.

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ad0 bs=1M count=1

took care of it. In another case, I was re-using a disk from an old laptop which had a GPT table on it. The above trick was insufficient as BSD found the backup copy of the GPT table on the last block and attempted to use it (with warnings plastered on the screen). Install again failed. To fix this I needed to:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ad0 bs=1M count=1 seek=(the value from the kernel messages about the size of the disk in MB - 1)

and then install proceeded. Nicely enough, there was no need to reboot, just entering the installer again recognized the disk correctly, now lacking labels.

I'm happily giving the installer permission to destroy my disk contents, so it ought to do so with feeling.

tested with 2.0RC3/i386