FIREBOX X1250e 2.2.4 upgrade failure

[afterlife]

Hi all,

As I suspected, my in-place installation of 2.2.4 failed. I am trying to do an upgrade on a WATCHGUARD FIREBOX X1250e

SPECS:
2.2.3-RELEASE (i386)
built on Tue Jun 23 16:37:33 CDT 2015
FreeBSD 10.1-RELEASE-p13
Update available. Click Here to view update.
nanobsd (4g)
NanoBSD Boot Slice pfsense0 / ada0s1 (rw)
Intel(R) Pentium(R) M processor 2.13GHz
2GB MEMORY
4GB CF CARD

I have added hint.ata.0.mode=PIO4 to /boot/loader.conf.local (hell, I added it to /boot/loader.conf as well)
When I rebooted it failed saying it timed out reading the card: I rebooted and did a "set hint.ata.0.mode=PIO4" and "boot" re-added the loader.conf/loader.conf.local but it still fails!

This has happened every single time I've done an upgrade, I DREAD to see that update available message now.

Trouble is, it gives me two options when booting 1 and 2 ….. 2 being 2.2.4 .... when I choose 2 it brings up a boot menu (space to pause etc) but it doesnt accept any of my keystrokes to interrupt the boot sequence.
I'm posting this now from my fallback 2.2.3 which I rebooted to by pressing 1 at boot time.

Can anyone shed any light on why 2.2.4 won't honour my settings?

Thanks kindly.