Ryf

at this point, its been running this way and seems to be a great workaround, everything appears to be fine, and I guess worst case is I have a bootable drive ready and unplugged to use to recover if needed, dumb newb trick appears to be fine.

This may well be the case, I guess I will let it run and see what happens

I actually was going for a full install, I just installed the image for the mem stick install on to the hard drive and ran it because it wouldn't boot from a mem stick. It appears to be a full install

I'm sorry, still getting back in the swing with forums. I like it, its a good looking rig, with no CD drive in the front and the beauty door closed it has hugely steady temps, no complaints here. I'm planning two double gigabit cards, the big thing is I want to VPN, but first isolating the smart TV's, VOIP, and other "technology" from the phones, PC's and printer side of the network, while keeping some semblance of QOS.

Yes it's the Inspiron 530s (s for sff I guess) I'd complain it's old and lacks aes-ni but it was free and since I don't know what I'm doing I'm not loosing money to figure it out lol

I am a Pfsense newb, so I appologoze in advance. I have a Dell 530s with a dual core 3.3ghz processor, for the life of me the thing will not boot pfsense mem stick. Win 10 setup USB works fine, the PC has win10 installed on the drive. I then pushed the image into the SSD I was going to use for pfsense and once it loaded, it booted and I let it overwrite the pfsense install information on the SSD, I unplugged the win 10 drive and boot up pfsense just fine... Is there any reason this could cause problems later? Any ideas why my PC didn't like the USB? I tried two different USB drives with pfsense and it was a no go. Part of me feels like, "I think it's working and should just go with it", the other side wanted to check in before cutting it loose, but since I don't know what to look for problem-wise I'm wary to trust it. Hope someone unstood half of this and I appreciate any help available.