Hiya!

Ok... at first I assumed there was something crazy going on with my CF 
card, then I tried another and had the same result. And then I tried 
using a SD card inside of a SD-CF adapter and got the 4801 to boot.  I 
then wrote to the soekris list to see if this was a known issue with the 
4801, but found outhers are having the same issue.  

Here are my findings, but please keep in mind I am making some 
assumptions as I do not know the innerworkings of m0n0wall.

Basically, the system will not boot correctly with a true CF card.  The 
soekris unit sees the CF card as " Pri Mast CF"  and thus it is 
/dev/ad0a.  When you boot with a SD chip inside of a CF adapter the 
Soekris sees this as "Pri Sla SD Adapter" and it is assigned /dev/ad1a.

The M0n0wall startup tries to mount /dev/ad1a, and I can only assume the 
XML lives there.  Because if you try to boot with the CF card the mout 
is never made, the XML is thus never avaliable and you are get M0n0wall 
with the configuration menu, but only the "4) Reset to factory defaults" 
seems to work.  All other menu choices simply reload the menu.

Here is what I get from the std-out/err when booting the soekris with a 
CF card in it:
ad0: 245MB <SanDisk SDCFB-256> [980/16/32] at ata0-master PIO4
Mounting root from ufs:/dev/md0c
mount: /dev/ad1a: Device not configured
XML configuration file not found.

While the SD card just states:

ad1: 14MB <SD Adapter> [455/2/32] at ata0-slave PI02


Is this something I am doing?  Or are my assumptions correct?