

Dave posted this on the 21st of July, not everything goes to pieces when you are away mate!
http://www.osnews.com/comments/23594
EDIT: OK, my bad, that was PC-BSD 8.1....please forgive me!
Edited 2010-08-16 01:26 UTC
It installed on an older laptop after I
figured out that before the install
was finalized an irq conflict with the
pccard(s). was hanging the boot (new kernel)
or the sysintall or something...
...
The other issue which may temporarily
stymie
some upgraders (v7 v8) , is the new (newbie
here) hard drive driver(s) and/or
code, search the freebsd.org forum
(keyword "devices") and multiple
posts regarding fixes should be found.
(In my case, loading geom_bsd.ko
geom_mbr.ko and geom_label.ko in
/boot/loader.conf; that was v7 > v8 STABLE
awhile back).
That 8.1 causes some ethernet switches to crash?
Not kidding... I tested it on my netbook, and found that it made the port it was plugged into unusable every time I tried to run the DHCP client. Yes, unusable for other computers, not just the netbook; and other OSes, not just FreeBSD. I tried several ports and it happened for all of them.
Rebooting the switch fixed it of course. But killing the ethernet ports was completely reproducible.
(The switch, FWIW, is a cheapo D-Link model, and the netbook is an Eee 1005HAB, whose ethernet chipset only became fully supported as of 8.1 If anyone can offer a solution to this problem I'd be greatful.)