Problems with FreeBSD installation

[Miguel]

Hi,

I've been trying to install FreeBSD in my laptop, but without success.  I
started with 7.2, but during installation i got the error:

  "No disk found!  Please verify that your disk controller..."

Looking at the logs, everything seems fine to me (although its my first time on
the FreeBSD world).  I get lines such as:

atapci0: <ATI IXP600 SATA300 controller> [...]
atapci0: [ITHREAD]
atapci0: AHCI Version 01.10 controller with 4 ports detected
ata2: <ATA channel 0> on atapci0
ata2: [ITHREAD]
ata3: <ATA channel 1> on atapci0
ata3: [ITHREAD]
ata4: <ATA channel 2> on atapci0
ata4: [ITHREAD]
ata5: <ATA channel 3> on atapci0
ata5: [ITHREAD]
[...]
atapci1: <ATI IPX600 UDMA 133 controller> [...]
ata0: <ATA channel 0> on atapci1
ata0: [ITHREAD]
[...]

(Note that i wrote these logs manually -- got some photos that I can upload to
some URL if needed.)

So, could not find any issues in the logs, apart from some ACPI errors:

acpi0_check: nexus0 attached
acpi0_check: acpi0 not-present
acpi0_check: acpi0 not-present
acpi0_check: acpi0 not-present
acpi0_check: acpi0 not-present
...

in fact, I have some other ACPI-related errors at the beginning of the logs, but
these are common also on Linux -- I believe these are due to a buggy BIOS, which
unfortunately I am not able to upgrade since I have not windows installed (I
have a Toshiba Satellite A210).

Anyway, I decided to try a more recent version of FreeBSD and downloaded

  8.0-CURRENT-200906-amd64-disc1.iso

which was the most recent snapshot for my Turion64 processor.

Tried to boot it but this time the installation just freeze before the install
application event starts.  Last log lines are:

acpi0: Could not initialise SystemIO handler: AE_NOT_EXIST
device_attach: acpi0 attach returned 6
Timecounters tick every 1.000 msec
md0: Preload image </boot/mfsroot> 4194304 bytes at 0xffffffff80fd8660
SMP: AP CPU #1 Launched!
WARNING: WITNESS option enabled, expect reduced performance.
Trying to mount root from ufs:/dev/md0
warning: no time-of-day clock registered, system time will not be set accurately

And at this point... nothing else -- system freezes.

Please let me know if anyone has any suggestions for me to have a FreeBSD
installation on my laptop.  I am, of course, available to provide any additional
information you might need to debug the issue.

Thanks!
--
Miguel