why is freebsd so unstable ???

[ritesh parmar]

Hello everybody.  I've just recently install Freebsd 5.1  on my system 
(AD77 Infinity motherboard, Nvidia fx 5600, 512 Megs of ram).  I spent 
an entire day configuring and  booting between freebsd and win2000. The 
next day when i booted up my system ( after shutting it down with  
 >shutdown -p now) it failed to boot up and said "Init: not found in 
path."  I couldn't figure out a way around this so I re-installed it and 
spent another day setting everything up. THE VERY NEXT DAY I started my 
computer and  got the same error message? Does anybody know why this is 
happening ?? Freebsd OS has its own 80 gig hard drive (with seagate's 
track manager). 

Is it possible to make a boot disk and then mount the freebsd partition 
(to fix errors in the boot up script )?