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I recently decided to install pfSense on an old i386 machine. The setup used the installer disc to install on a 40GB hard drive.

1. Boot from pfSense Live Install Disc
2. When prompted I pressed I to start the installer
3. When the installer menu came up I chose Quick and Easy Setup

The problem I came across happened during the install process with the following error:

Execution of the command
/sbin/fdisk -v -f /tmp/new.fdisk ad0
FAILED with a return code of 1.

Resizing the partition to 30GB¶

I found that the current pfSense 2.1.5 installer fails to install on partitions larger than 30GB. To work around the error, I rebooted the pfSense installer disc and instead of booting the installer setup, I allowed the allowed it to boot until the prompt for configuring VLANs, I just chose N for this, because I just needed access to the shell.

1. When the numbered prompt appeared, I pressed
   

   8
   

2. When the shell appeared, I ran the following:
   

   gpart show ad0
   

3. This will display the hard drive and partitions, next I resized the partition to 30GB:
   

   gpart -i 1 -s 30GB ad0
   

4. I then exited the shell:
   

   exit
   

5. Then reran the installer:
   

   99
   

6. Next I chose a Custom Install
7. I skipped the formatting step
8. I also skipped the partitioning step
9. I chose Accept and create bootblocks
10. The same error came up while installing again, however I skipped the error
11. I then chose Accept and create subpartitions
12. And then selected the Symmetric Multi Processing kernel
13. And finally I rebooted

This workaround managed to solve this problem for me.