The bleeding edge isn’t a place I normally visit, but the newly constructed desktop machine appears to be closer to the “bleeding edge” than I realised! It’s so close that freeBSD 5.4 doesn’t fully support the motherboard, but (apparently) 6 does, so I’m downloading a 6 Beta ISO image to burn and try and install from. Of course had I done a search for the specific board I was getting I could have saved myself the effort of downloading the 5.4 ISO first 🙂 It’s been such a strange day though that I’m not surprised at this problem.

In trying to burn the CD I have managed to confirm that the disk is the problem on the current machine, so using the RAID facilities on the new machine should (hopefully) reduce my vulnerability to disk issues. The last few serious issues I’ve had with my home machines have all been disk related, so finding that this problem is disk related comes as little surprise.