Hi,
I’m just posting briefly because it’s been a bad day...
So, graham, yes there definitely is something odd going on with the disk drive(s), I’ll get back to you with the results of those commands. (I’m writing this on my phone).
When I said “Windows was still lurking” I only meant that the FreeBSD installer had appeared to work - not that it had worked. In any case there is still an option of Windows in the f12 triggered boot menu, I don’t know what it does (if anything) and I’m certainly not going to select it. I don’t know if anyone has any thoughts on that?
@jbfvwm2, I tried the i915kms driver initially and I got X and KDE running, but KDE’s compositor kept crashing (about once per hour or if I logged out of KDE, almost guaranteed a crash). So I’ve now installed nvidia-driver with pkg. At this point KDE kept crashing, leaving me with a blank screen with just a white block cursor at the top left. I fixed it by turning off “hybrid graphics” in the BIOS. This means it uses the nVidia all the time but frankly after fighting with x all day I’m happy to concede to that. If it proves stable I will happily post my xorg.conf.d files, they’re actually very short.