FreeBSD 7 load hangs on boot

[ThinkDifferently]

ThinkDifferently wrote:
> 
> Another item of curiosity...
> I just now tried booting from a CentOS 5.2 DVD.  It also hangs with a
> little window titled "Loading SCSI driver" that says "Loading ahci
> driver..."  The funny thing is, I've tried turning off all RAID
> functionality in the BIOS.  On my mobo, this entails setting it to IDE
> mode, instead of RAID or AHCI.  That doesn't appear to do anything.
> 

I'm at my wit's end with this.  I tried FreeBSD in every way I know how, and
they all hang.  I tried CentOS and it hung.  I even tried Windows Vista
Ultimate.  It didn't hang, but it found no storage devices.  That led me to
a train of thought.  This board has 6 SATA ports on it, and in the BIOS it
has 3 settings for them -- IDE, RAID or AHCI.  When I put it into IDE mode,
it shows me each disk as an individual device, but all of the OS'es fail to
recognize them.  When I put it into RAID mode, it recognizes each disk as a
SATA device and offers me the RAID options (F10) on bootup.  When I put it
into AHCI mode, nothing at all is recognized.  Furthermore, I was reading in
the board's manual that to load Windows XP or Vista, a special driver
diskette is required for Windows to recognize the storage volumes.  This
leads me to believe that the only way this board knows how to handle SATA
disks is to use RAID mode, and the only way for an OS to recognize the RAID
volume is to have a driver pre-loaded before the OS.  For OS'es like FreeBSD
and CentOS this is very difficult, even if such a driver exists.

Unless somebody can correct me for being way off base, my conclusion can
only be that this board cannot support a Unix/Linux operating system, and
even with Windows it's extremely difficult.

I'm now considering returning this board and suffering the dreaded 15%
restocking fee.

Can anyone suggest a motherboard that is FreeBSD friendly?  I need it to
support 4 cores with the AM2+ socket (either that, or I need to return my
chip too) and be a full ATX board with 4 DDR2 ram slots.  On board VGA would
be nice too, but I suppose I can buy a VGA card.
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