new 6.1 install will not boot

[Perry Hutchison]

I've just installed FreeBSD 6.1 on a Dell Pentium III, and I must have
done something wrong -- or missed a step -- somewhere along the way.

When trying to boot, I do not get even as far as the situation
described in sec. 4.2.5 of the installation instructions.  The system
hangs, with a completely blank screen and the curson on (I think) the
second line, immediately after the BIOS loads the boot record from the
FreeBSD partition.  Keyboard input is ignored except for CtrlAltDel,
which reboots and hangs again the same way.  Booting a Windows 98 CD
and running fdisk confirms that the FreeBSD partition is active.

I'm not even getting anywhere trying to read the documentation:
I can still boot from the FreeBSD CD, but if I try to view the HTML
docs from the Doc menu it says this can only be done after the system
is installed.  (The system *has* been installed, it just won't boot!)

Is there any way to recover from this?  Even if I were to start
completely over I would have no clue what to do differently.
If it were a Linux installation I would try booting from floppy,
but I did not see any chance during the FreeBSD installation to
create a boot floppy.