Booting v5.2.1 (Ver 2)

[je killen]

I have installed FreeBSD version 5.2.1 from a Powerpack package boxed 
from Fry's Electronics in Burbank Cal. on a ShuttleX
machine with Nvidia Nforce motherboard, AMD Athlon XP processor, 512Mb 
memory, (40Gb ATA hard drive) ATI Radeon 9200 AGP graphics card. I have 
a CD R/W-DVD reader set to be the boot drive if there is a bootable cd 
inserted. The First time I tried to boot from the first CD in the 
package the system froze at a particular step in the boot sequence. 
After trying a few times I got it to boot into the installer. I 
stumbled around with the installer and seemed to get the process 
completed successfully.

I have been able to get the machine to TRY to boot from the hard drive 
but the system hangs in the same location in the boot sequence as the 
first attempt with the cd. (refer to the attached jpeg).

I have attached a jpeg of the screen frozen at the point at which it 
stops (where the cursor is in at the bottom of the screen).

Can anybody view the jpeg and be able to tell me what the problem might 
be?
(I know of no way to retrieve a text file of this because the system 
doesn't finish booting so there's no log entries to fetch).
There is another version that was packaged with Sams 'FreeBSD 
Unleashed' (The version isn't on the cd but it was 4x)
I was successful in installing that version on this machine and used it 
in console mode for a few weeks while I tried to figure out whyit 
refused to start Xwindows. (Apparently, it was the graphics card. There 
didn't seem to be a driver for the onboard Nvidia video;
that's why I got the ATI graphics board).
I couldn't find any specific support for the ATI graphics card in the 
4x system install cd so I decided to install the 5.2.1 version
During the install process of the 5.2.1 version. I was able to get the 
graphical xfree86 config application to run, which suggests that the 
ATI graphics board is working.

But wouldn't it be nice if I could get the system to boot?

I don't plan on keeping Freebsd on this machine, unless I can get it to 
work fantastically well (I had Mandrake Linux v9.0 installed on it 
along side Windows XP Home, it worked great).

One other question, I'm considering the purchase of an HP laptop with 
an Athlon 64 processor. I think that a laptop is a good choice for a 
server because of the battery and the small spacial volume. I am 
planning on serving web content from my home network over
an ADSL connection and don't expect more than light to moderate traffic 
to the site. It will also be running an authoritative named
server and revers web proxy for the inside network. Is something that 
is workable, or is it asking too much of a machine like that?

Thank you for your response in advance.
jekillen at prodigy.net