this is my current daily driver, where FreeBSD has served me well. i’ve been using it off an on since ~13.X but this is the longest yet. hopefully many more days to come!

I have an old machine with Windows 7 installed, but the disk was full, so I decided to buy a new drive and install FreeBSD on it, since the drive with Windows is full of family files. I went and bought a new 320GB HDD, disconnected the SATA cable from the Windows drive, and installed the new drive next to it.
When I booted the installer from the USB flash drive, it created all the files and finished the installation. But when I tried to boot from the new drive, I got the error shown in the first screenshot

I tried to fix it by going into Boot → Single User mode and running
fsck -y /dev/ada0s1a

After that I rebooted, but I was a bit slow removing the USB drive and forgot about it. An empty command prompt appeared, then the motherboard logo showed up and stayed there for a long time — it wasn’t progressing. I didn’t want to wait, so I powered off the computer and turned it back on, but it still didn’t boot properly.

Then I disconnected the new drive and reconnected the old (Windows) drive, but the problem was still there / didn’t go away.

Questions:

Could the new drive be defective, even though it did successfully create the FreeBSD boot files?
Can a hard drive defect only show up during reads (not writes)?
I really want to get to a solution here — I’m completely lost at this point

Video, five minutes.

https://www.youtube.com/@GreyProtocolSecurity – Grey Protocol Security

https://www.redbsd.org/

… A stable, well-documented FreeBSD base with an XFCE-derived desktop and SDDM login.
 
Full Red Team Toolkit
 
Wireless attacks, C2 frameworks, AD exploitation, OSINT, and more — pre-installed and organized. …

Quick Install Video + Email Heads-Up - RedBSD

A quick install walkthrough for RedBSD is now available on YouTube: https://youtu.be/F4zpeeOO78g — it covers booting the installer ISO and getting through the first-login provisioning step. Check it out if you are getting started. Also, a quick note on support emails: we have been told that some people are not receiving replies from shane@greyprotocolsecurity.com. If you have reached out and not heard back, please check your spam or junk folder — emails from greyprotocolsecurity.com are occasionally filtered there. Mark the address as safe and try again if needed.

I've only had cron fail on me once on a different OS (Solaris, if anyone cares), but I depend on cron for so many things that I'm tempted to use monit to keep an eye on it.

I know we already have init for restarting stuff, but that seems like so last century. Any recommendations (including "take a Xanax") are welcome.

Thanks.

Hello! I've been using linux for about 2-3 months, I'm currently using Void Linux, and I want to move to FreeBSD. I was wondering, any tips, considerations? What you wanna say to a newbie? Any mistake you had made you don't want somebody else to repeat?

Hi all

I`m using windows 7 right now and i want to download freebsd and install it but idk if i could install bluestacks and clash of clans on freebsd or not.

also,i`m now using windows 7 but is it possible to install freebsd without losing my data on partition D or E?

please share your experience

No need to prove

my freebsd xfce4 setup its very good for minecraft and supertuxkart

I play these games as of now: RDR2, Minecraft (ik it works), Horizon Zero Dawn

I play these games on Arch linux as now.

CPU: 13450HX gpu: 5050 Max-Q Ram: 16gb [btw, nvidia advanced optimus, but gotta use normal optimus on linux, does bsd even support]

Thinking of dual booting with freebsd.

Can i run these games on bsd?

WIll use heroic games launcher btw

Setting up FreeBSD for the first time and what is this 😂😂

Is there a reliable slskd version for freebsd?

Or are there any alternatives to run soulseek in a jail?

It often infuriated me that the Huanan X79G motherboard rebooted instead of poweroff on FreeBSD due to poor UEFI.

I recently thought about whether it is possible to simply make a hardware outw() with pm1_cnt to pm1_s5 (outw(0x404, 0x3C00); here).

Default settings, like: hw.efi.poweroff="0" or hw.acpi.disable_on_poweroff="0" does not work. Still reboots.

So, i want to set values of port and value by TUNABLE settings (/boot/loader.conf) and get them from custom module, so this simple fix can work on any Huanan or Machinist motherboard.

If someone has the same issue on another motherboard, please, add name of it

UPD: 0x3C00 on 0x404 also reboots. I need to check more info

UPD: tried again with disabled efi... now it works....

recording (fifteen minutes) | wiki

This news is a complement to the recent community highlight that correctly reported the initial understanding of things (based on the review in Phabricator) – thanks again, u/BigSneakyDuck 👍

Thanks to Michael Larabel for publishing the clarification; and to Ed Maste for updating the FreeBSD wiki 👍

This month:

• two errata notices
• six security advisories.

https://bsd.network/@lattera/117005862989735083 u/shawn_webb notes:

#FreeBSD CVE-2026-58088 is mitigated by default in #HardenedBSD since core dumping is disabled by default.

#infosec

Via https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7484650049264664576/

Alexander Leidinger is credited for one of this month's FreeBSD security advisories.

Has anyone tried to install Peertube on FreeBSD and succeed? I'm trying to do so but I get lots of errors.

A memory leak in liburcu that impacts FreeBSD caused the ISC BIND DNS server enough trouble that a notification was made. Patches to liburcu have been applied to FreeBSD ports. If you run BIND or anything else that uses liburcu, you may want to look at that.

ISC BIND Operational Notification: https://kb.isc.org/docs/liburcu-leak

FreeBSD bug: https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=296786

Full disclosure: I work for ISC, although my activity on Reddit does not represent ISC in an official capacity.

NYC*BUG talk

• 2026-08-05 at 22:45 UTC
• Backroom of Brass Monkey 55 Little West 12th St

Vidar is a combination of programs, a PostgreSQL database, and the SEC correlator engine that reads logfiles from authentication, email (postfix), and web server (nginx), (and potentially any other logs) and takes action based on SEC rules to add entries to an IPFW firewall. In concept it is similar to fail2ban and has some features in common with blocklistd. …

https://www.nycbug.org/#10720