I installed 3.8 on an 1855 with no problems about two weeks ago. All my apps worked, and had no problems until I rebooted the box (not the first reboot, and not because of an issue of any kind.) Upon reboot, it fails to boot right away, with the "now trying bsd.old....etc" messages finally booting to bsd. Towards the end of the boot process the following message appears.
sd0(mpt0:0:0): mpt0: timeout request index = 0xfe, seq = 0x000000ce mpt0: Status 0x80000000, Mask 0x00000001, Doorbell 0x24000000 mpt0: request state: On Chip panic: cannot read disk label, 0x400/0xd00, error 5 Stopped at Debugger+0x4: leave Then the message to run ps before reporting this. The only problem is that the machine is un-responsive at this point. The only keyboard I can connect is USB (this is a blade) and is not responsive. I'm not sure how to get the diagnostic information that would be useful. I did google this, and the only fix's I found were updating to -current (but that was in 3.5) and one person said that getting cooling to his box fixed the problem. I know cooling is not an issue, not even close. Any advice would be appreciated.