Well, after several more hours of banging my head against this problem, I finally found a solution Thanks Mike! to the problem in these very forums.
The thread lives here: http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php?topic=6840.0
And the meat of it revolves around running these commands after Live cd boot before installing, and once again on first boot from the CF after installing.
set hw.ata.ata_dma=0
boot
Rather than copy/paste and possibly diverging the original thread, I'll just let anyone curious follow the link to the thread above.
Once safely running off the CF card, you may then enter this into the boot loader .conf file, and it works every time. :)
-M@