Whilst I was using a NetBSD system I was getting frequent kernel panics whilst copying over some files from FAT32 formatted drive and the same on an EXT2 formatted drive. The same problem also happened on an OpenBSD system.
It took me a while before I had the light bulb moment that it was the
drives that were the issue but simply the drives were "dirty" and needed
to be cleaned. All we need to do is use the
fsck utility to clean the drive.
First we must dertimine the file system type of the drive/partition
that needs to be cleaned using the
disklabel utility:
disklabel sd1
Change "sd1" with the appropriate drive, for FreeBSD the drive
labels will look a bit different like ada0.
Now use
fsck with the appropriate fs type
as follows:
fsck_msdos /dev/sd1i
Of course, like before change "/dev/sd1i" with the
drive and partition that you wish to clean. You will also want to change
"fsck_msdos" with the fs type you need.
After all of this the drive
should be clean and the kernel panics should stop