I've seen several posts online saying the FreeBSD / GhostBSD installer has got stuck at the Loading kernel... stage immediately after the boot loader menu (where you get the "Welcome to FreeBSD" or "Welcome to GhostBSD" notice, a pretty logo, and a menu of boot options).
This happened to me on an old (2009) Dell Inspiron 1545 when installing GhostBSD 25.01-R14.2p1. On the line after Loading kernel..., I had a blinking cursor and a slash character which is supposed to "spin", but didn't. The installer was stuck and no further progress was made.
Here's what worked for me: restart the computer, and at the GhostBSD installer's boot menu change Cons from Video to Serial by repeatedly pressing the displayed key (C or 5). Then press Enter to boot multi user. After that, everything installed flawlessly. There was no problem booting into the new system, even when leaving Cons set to Video - it only needed to be set to Serial during installation.
This trick worked for me. It may not work for you. But since I've never seen it suggested on other threads where people got stuck at "Loading kernel...", I thought I should document my success story somewhere. Along with such excellent advice as "confirm the iso checksum is correct", "try the USB drive in a different USB port", "try a different USB drive in case this one is faulty". it may be worth suggesting someone stuck at a similar stage "try setting Cons to Serial".
(For posterity, there are a few other things I tried which got me past the "Loading kernel..." stage, but the computer just restarted once it reached the GhostBSD splash screen, and before the system image was loaded to memdisk. So, nothing was ever installed. One way was to boot into single user from the boot menu (S or 2), get into the shell then immediately exit. Another was to go into boot options from the menu (7 or O), toggle off ACPI (A or 3), backspace back to the main menu, then press enter to boot multi user.)
