OPNsense will only boot once with config

[mow4cash]

Everything was working fine for years and then OPNsense went down. When it went down it locked up my connected windows computer. I tried to start OPNsense back up to no avail.I thought for sure there was a hardware issue so I ran memtest and smart extended. Everything checked out good so I ran a live installer and imported a recent backup. Everything booted up fine and I'm back running. Reboot the router and the same issue happens where it won't boot up. Did the same thing another time to confirm. Then I just installed to factory defaults and everything works and I can restart fine.

What could cause it to boot the restored config fine but not reboot it again? What logs should I be looking at and is there an easy way to isolate the errors? Why would the Windows pc lockup during the crash?

[ftrojahn]

We had the same problem last week. Tried to install 20.1, then 19.7 by importing from usb-stick:conf/config.xml.

Same here - all was working flawlessly, but then it failed every time after first reboot, see attachment. On every try it stuck after "pfsync.ko". Using 19.7 it was somewhere later ... but same blue "Booting..." line, then nothing.

Then, we tried the install without import, configuring only lan/wan interfaces,internal IP and DHCP-Server.
We imported the same config.xml after installation via Gui - no problems with reboot after that.

For now, we stick with 19.7 as we had no time to do further tests.