I have a test machine. Nothing special except for the dell 2350 mobo. Everything works. Somehow I had 7.1-RELEASE on it already. I zeroed the disk to reinstall 7.1R from disc1. The install went fine. But when booting from disk I hit the loader skip_newlines issue: http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2009-January/047996.html So I booted 7.1R disc1, set rootdev=disk1s1a, boot -sv, copied in the /boot/loader from the 7.2-RC1 base pkg and that worked to boot the freshly installed 7.1R from disk. So I figured to use 7.2-RC1 now, and zeroed the disk for that. However 7.2-RC1 disc1 won't boot on this hardware but does on an older system. It seems to try to access the disc but doesn't print anything on console and the BIOS passes and proceeds to onboard DHCP/PXE booting. Oh, and burncd burns discs with what looks like a bad offset into them. I've seen this before. Had to use cdrecord, and with that all the hashes for the cd's verify ok. All the firmwares are up to date and everything's plain vanilla. Sorry, three issues in one :) So this is just a report while I tinker more... in case anyone else is seeing these things. I'm guessing some strange CDROM speed or write quality issue, not showstoppers.