Can't boot from CF

[nor_cal]

Hello everybody
It might sound weird, but I'm having a hard time making my PC boot from a 2 GB CF card. I am using this system already with FreeNAS 7 for years and decided it's about time to switch to 8.3-p1. I unpackend and dd'ed the .img to my CF card, fdisk says it has four 0x05 (FreeBSD) partitions. My system gets stuck with "Insert proper boot medium" (or the like). I wonder why the 8.3 img does not have DOS partition to boot from, but only FreeBSD partitions.

Thanks,
Peter

 

[HAL9000]

Have you tried using 4GB CF? The 2 GB CF may have less than 2 GB capacity.

I found this note in the documentation
NOTE: at this time, the installer does not check the size of the install media before attempting an installation. A 2 GB device is required, but the install will appear to complete successfully on smaller devices, only to fail at boot. If using a USB thumb drive, a 4 GB drive is recommended as many 2 GB thumb drives have a smaller capacity which will result in a seemingly successful installation that fails to boot.

 

[nor_cal]

Thanks HAL, for your reply. I rewrote my CF card yesterday and gave it a new try, but no miracle happened in the meantime and it still doesn't work. Your advise to try a 4 GB card sounds good, will try it out later. However, what makes me wonder (if 2GB size is too small) - isn't the boot sector at the very beginning of a medium? Shouldn't be me system be able to boot the kernel at least?

 

[nor_cal]

SOLVED

My 2GB CF card indeed did not have 2 GB, but slightly less. Installing from CD targetting a larger CF card worked.