Possible Large HD preventing boot?

[K. Lewin]

Hello-
I have a 1.2GHz Athlon Thunderbird processor on a Shuttle AK12a motherboard.  

I recently installed a Hitachi 180GB HDD as my primary hard drive.  No other hard drives are currently installed in the system.  

When trying to boot a FreeBSD floppy (with kern.flp) or a CD-RW with the installation iso, it freezes on the cursor that alternates from |,/,-\,|, etc.   No error messages, just stops on one of the alternating characters while trying to load/boot the kernel.  

I currently have a 10Gig primary partition in which WinXP Home edition resides.  I left the rest of the hard drive unallocated for the FreeBSD install.  

I know my problem is not installation media, I'm suspecting it's the large hard drive and it's incompatibility with FreeBSD.   I have tried FreeBSD 5.2 and 4.9 with the exact same results.  
I also know the drive itself is in fine working order, WinXP Home installed fine and is working fine.  

I would really appreciate any suggestions, after installing FreeBSD 5.2 on another AMD K6 machine, I am impressed thus far.  

Also, my question is not how to boot FreeBSD from any specific partition, I am getting stopped just trying to start the installation process.  

Thanks very much,
Kevin