Trouble writing arm64-aarch64-memstick to microSD to boot netgate sg-1000

[absduser]

I have a mini router from netgate - the SG-1000. It is sold as a pfsense device but it has a microSD card slot inside of it.

I have what I *thought* was a good recipe for writing a FreeBSD img file to an SD card, but when I put the SD card into the netgate SG-1000 (and insert the jumper on the boot jumper pins) the system just prints the letter CCCCCCCCCCC over and over forever.

This is what we would expect the netgate SG-1000 to do if the microSD card is being booted but is not bootable.

My process for creating a bootable microSD card in mac OSX is:

- insert USB adapter with microSD card inside
- using Disk Utility GUI tool, format/erase the card to FAT format
- diskutil list (see what device it is)
- diskutil unmountDisk disk7
- dd if=./FreeBSD-12.1-RELEASE-arm64-aarch64-memstick.img of=/dev/disk7 bs=1024000
- diskutil eject /dev/disk7

This seems to work and I have used this recipe before but I am getting nowhere with it.

Is there something about an ARM image ? Does netgate sg-1000 expect some other kind of format or boot image ? Is memstick not the right image for me to be using ?

Any comments or suggestions appreciated.

 

[T-Daemon]

I have a mini router from netgate - the SG-1000.
...
- dd if=./FreeBSD-12.1-RELEASE-arm64-aarch64-memstick.img ....

The specs of the SG-1000 shows the CPU as a ARM Cortex-A8. FreeBSD Arm/Allwinner wiki lists the Cortex-A8 supported by armv7. You could try FreeBSD-12.1-RELEASE-arm-armv7-GENERICSD.img

Follow the recommendation in the handbook how to write the image: 2.3.1.1. Writing an Image File to USB