Using one big "a" partition means: - higher risk of filesystem damage to system partitions after an unsafe restart (crash, power failure): if a partition isn't actively written to, it's less likely to suffer damage
- missing protective flags (e.g. nodev, nosuid) that are set on mounts that don't need to hold device nodes/suid binaries * running a system configuration that is further away from what other users are running, increasing the chance that you'll run into bugs that others haven't found yet * The workaround some have been suggesting (using the i386 boot loader to run amd64) takes you *even further* from a standard configuration. It might get you out of a hole, but do yourself a favour, reinstall with a more normal partition layout and restore from your backups. (it doesn't need to be the automatic default, but it's at least advisable to have separate partitions for /, /usr, /usr/local, /var, /home, and probably also /usr/ports if you are building from ports).
