Unable to normal boot into opnSense even after fresh install with config restore

[JannisSense]

Hey!

My opnSense instance is no longer booting and the screen turns black while trying to start Unbound or Cron (hard to tell with the speed it happens).
The instance then seems to crash and is not reachable by any means (direct ethernet connection, attached keyboard).
However, when trying booting into safe mode, everything is booting just fine.

This led me to do a fresh install and restore my config. After restoring the config, I had never connected opnSense to the internet, i.e. no updates or custom packages (like e.g. caddy) where installed yet and thus everything should still be fairly vanilla.
Now the issue still continues while booting. This makes me wonder whether something is wrong with
1. My configuration? The issue started appearing while I was on vacation and I hadn't touched any configuration in the prior days either.
2. My hardware? Could explain the flakiness initially. But even with just the Motherboard, CPU, PSU and SSD the issue seems reproducable.
3. Is there any other known bug?

What would be the best way to debug this? I tried going through the logs in safe mode, but I couldn't find anything of interested.

I am running opnSense on a custom hardware on a ASRock J4125M motherboard and a 2-port Intel NIC.
Recently I started seeing rare crashes, which got worse and led me to replace the motherboard and PSU after some debugging. However, I'm still not fully sure if this had anything to do with the current issue.

Really happy about any suggestions or help as this has been confusing me for at least 2 weeks now.

[axsdenied]

Just keying off your use of "instance"...Are you virtualizing it?

[meyergru]

There have been reports of N100 machines with the newest Intel microcode updates - do you have the plugin enabled?

[JannisSense]

There have been reports of N100 machines with the newest Intel microcode updates - do you have the plugin enabled?

I haven't installed os-cpu-microcode-intel, neither did I do any manual configuration of those in the past.

Just keying off your use of "instance"...Are you virtualizing it?

Ah, should have mentioned that. I am running it on bare-metal.

I will try a fresh install on a new SSD later today to rule out any issues with that.
I did also perform a MemTest, which reported no issues with that memory either.

I currently suspect that the picoPSU or power adapter are faulty. When trying to reinstall to another SSD, I get random crashes while writing opnSense to the SSD. I will look for a proper PSU to test this.

[JannisSense]

Turns out that I had replaced the faulty PSU with another faulty PSU.
I have now replaced the PSU again and everything is working again.