Helps! Installation hangs for FreeBSD 4.x and 5.1

[Paul Shi]

Dear All,

I have encountered  in installing FreeBSD including version 4.3, 4.5, 4.6,
4.8 and 5.1 on my new Dell laptop. Here is some info about the laptop.

It came with Vista Home Basic. I have formatted the hard drive and installed
XP on it. While doing so, I change the SATA option from AHCI to ATA, which
may cause my following problem.

When I tried to install various version of FreeBSD, installation hangs at
different points.

For 4.3 and 4.5, installation hangs at following line:

*ppc0: parallel port not found*

For 4.6 and 4.8, installation hangs at following line:

*ata1-slave: ATAPI identify retries exceeded*

For 5.1, installation printed out something like:

*:/ write failed, filesystem is full
panic: Going nowhere without my init!

syncing disks, buffer remaining ... 454 454 290 290 290....

giving up on 125 buffers*

I have never encountered such problem since I have been playing with 4.3 for
a while on other older computers. I am wondering if any one has similar
experience and how it could be sovled. Thank all of you for your time to
read my question. Millions of thanks to all you guys!

Your sincerely,
Paul Shi
Electronic and Communication Engineering Senior
Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering
University of Hong Kong