Installation

It seems to me that the instructions how to copy the monowall image file to a CF disk using OSX are either incomplete or incorrect. I have two different USB CF card adapters, 5 different CF cards, 2 different WRAPs, 1 ALIX.2 and 2 different Soekris boards. No matter what combination of hardware I use, the outcome is always the same: the boards cannot find bootable data on any of the cards.

I do have another CF card on which I installed Debian more than a year ago. That CF card boots on all the boards. Unfortunately I do not remember how I created the partition/contents on that card. However, when I insert this card into the USB CF adapter, it shows up as having a partition scheme "Master Boot Record". The cards I wrote to using the instructions on the Monowall website always show up with a partition scheme of "Unformatted".

I then formatted the CF cards as FAT to get them to be recognised in the same way, then I wrote the monowall image to disk1s1 (the partition underneath the disk itself) but that also did not result in a bootable CF card.

Can somebody help out, please?

thanks in advance

Hi by "OSX" you mean your on a mac, if so i found a video on you tube:

Part 1 = http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=5LeMdfpue0I
Part 2 = http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=6nWnWMOnpTE

This i guess was based on my videos from this site, and should work.

No, it doesn't work for me. I downloaded the pfsense image and wrote it to one of those CF cards using "gzcat pfsense....img.gz | dd of=/dev/disk1 bs=16k" and the boards boot from it. That card shows up under OSX as UFS formatted with a subpartition. By contrast, the cards to which I wrote the monowall image file always show up as "unformatted" and none of the boards recognise them as bootable.

I am beginning to suspect that there is something funny about the monowall image file. I downloaded it again, also downloaded it using curl instead of the browser, but it didn't make any difference. Yet, the process works with the pfsense image which means that the hardware is fine and the parameters for the dd utility are correct. This makes me suspicious that there might be something wrong with the image file itself.

Is there anybody here who has successfully created a bootable CF card from the monowall image under OSX? If so, how does the card show up under OSX? Does it say it is UFS formatted or does it say unformatted? From the video it appears as if the card is mountable under OSX after writing the image to it, in my case the card shows up unformatted and it cannot be mounted under OSX.

It works for me. Be aware that you really need todo gzcat even if the file does not have a .gz extension.

$ file Downloads/generic-pc-1.3b13*
Downloads/generic-pc-1.3b13.img:    gzip compressed data, was "generic-pc-1.3b13", from Unix, last modified: Sun Jul 13 16:36:13 2008, max compression

Good luck