single user mode freebsd11/rpi2

[John]

Hello list,

I need to either make the system single user node by either becoming
it (as root, shutdown now) or booting into it (either at the boot prompt or
with nextboot) and I can do neither, so obviously I'm going about this
the wrong way. "shutdown now" never returns a prompt and 
"nextboot -o "-s" -k kernel *will* boot the kernel after shutdown -p
but I get no prompt. Last two lines of output:

warning: no time-of-day clock registered, system time will not be set accurately
random: unblocking device.

and there it sits. I left it for 15 mins to make sure it wasn't just slow.
ctrl-alt-del rebooted the pi but other than that, nothing had any effect.

** also, rebooting didn't fix this. Nextboot, when it boots, attempts to zero
nextboot.conf but it couldn't do this. In order to get it to boot again
I had to remove the config by taking the sd card out and mounting it
on another machine. ***

How can I make it single user mode? The reason this needs to be done is
I need to move some filesystems around.

thanks,
-- 
John