So I'm setting up a shiny new monowall today and it's the first time
I've tried booting from a USB stick and the first thing on the display
monitor after the post is "invalid slice", followed by some
"/boot/kernel"-type messages and then a "boot:" prompt. I'm not sure
what to type at this point and am hoping to get this thing to boot
without me having to type anything at all, really.

The phrase "invalid slice" doesn't turn up a single result when
searching the list archive, although searching "invalid slice freebsd"
gets a bunch of hits that talk about partitioning and bootloaders and
such.

Obviously (to me, if not to you as a result of this brief post) the
system is attempting to boot from the usb stick, and reading the image
at least in part, but no dice.

I flashed this usb stick using the current (as of today)
physdiskwrite.exe and generic-pc-1.3b2.img.

Any thoughts?

db