okay, it booted on the other machine.

the username 'ghostbsd' and 'return' got me past the login screen. Now to go kill that. Looks great so far. But i have two finicky systems and

the other problem on that first machine was that the mouse never worked, the keyboard only worked once.

Can't set it when that screen was blacked out and it jumps to the opening page with Login requirements. There's only a glimpse of the boot menu. Then a black box blots out most of that menu. Nothing to do but let it boot to the Login/PW request. "ghostbsd" is there for the default username...