bitcoind starting and then quickly shutting down automatically
The solution is time consuming but easy. The flash drive was finally reporting read/write errors after a harsh shutdown. Formatting it and new install of bitcoind and loading all blocks again (I had no other drive where I could have copied this amount of data to and wanted to exclude potential issues with the old file permissions).

So the next few days I assume the machine will be busy. However now at block 8000 the CPU is only using 1-2% (Intel Core i5 with 8GB RAM on fedora linux)