I have had the hard disks in these laptops both in compatibility mode and AHCI.  I do not know if the driver crashes or something?  All I know is when I get to the system, the root FS is read only.

Output of dmesg relating to controller:

ahci0: <intel cougar="" point="" ahci="" sata="" controller="">port 0x80b0-0x80b7,0x80a0-0x80a3,0x8090-0x8097,0x8080-0x8083,0x8060-0x807f mem 0xe5420000-0xe54207ff irq 18 at device 31.2 on pci0
ahci0: AHCI v1.30 with 6 6Gbps ports, Port Multiplier not supported
ahcich0: <ahci channel="">at channel 0 on ahci0
ahcich1: <ahci channel="">at channel 1 on ahci0
ahcich3: <ahci channel="">at channel 3 on ahci0
ahcich4: <ahci channel="">at channel 4 on ahci0
ahcich5: <ahci channel="">at channel 5 on ahci0
ahciem0: <ahci enclosure="" management="" bridge="">on ahci0

Here is the hard drive input:

ada0 at ahcich0 bus 0 scbus1 target 0 lun 0
ada0: <wdc wd2500bevt-75a23t0="" 01.01a01="">ATA-8 SATA 2.x device
ada0: Serial Number WD-WXG1E21DEK71
ada0: 300.000MB/s transfers (SATA 2.x, UDMA6, PIO 8192bytes)
ada0: Command Queueing enabled
ada0: 238475MB (488397168 512 byte sectors: 16H 63S/T 16383C)
ada0: Previously was known as ad4
ses0 at ahciem0 bus 0 scbus6 target 0 lun 0
ses0: <ahci sgpio="" enclosure="" 1.00="" 0001="">SEMB S-E-S 2.00 device
ses0: SEMB SES Device

This has been happening ever since the upgrade to 2.x.  So years?

pfsense 1.x ran great!

The big problem I have, is that the fs goes readonly before anything is written to logs. I do not have a free PCMCIA slot for a compact flash card, even if I wanted to use one.  I could install to usb and try that.

I guess I could try and redirect system logging to a server but does anyone have any better ideas on capturing the log to help me figure out what this is?

Does anyone know what it is?  Is there a setting I could adjust to make pfsense use the hard drive less aggressively or something?

The system does not reboot so I do not think any crash data :/</ahci></wdc></ahci></ahci></ahci></ahci></ahci></ahci></intel>