Now I'm starting to feel retarded.  I've installed FBSD on the hard 
drive with an extra partition (FBSD partition, not DOS partition == FBSD 
slice) for m0n0wall, and haven't got it to boot successfully yet.  I can 
get it to load the kernel and run the software (sort of), but it can 
never get to the config.xml or the executables for the menu options, and 
constantly complains of a read-only file system.  Here are the steps 
I've gone through (after re-trying the dd to the bare drive that didn't 
work for me):

I installed FBSD 4.7 (newest I had) to the drive, using one DOS 
partition == Slice on the drive, occupying the whole drive.  I then 
tried untarring the rootfs tarball there, tried to boot, nada. 
Discovered that the tarball didn't seem to have a kernel (DUH!), and 
proceeded to reinstall FBSD 4.7, and made an extra partition just for 
m0n0wall, untarred the rootfs tarball there, followed the recipe to 
mount the generic image as a device to grab the kernel from there, and 
disovered that that didn't work much better.

Has anyone managed to make m0n0wall work from a regular IDE hard drive?

Sincerely,
Chris.