Help with Booting

[Doug Hardie]

I have an AMD based system that is driving me nuts.  I am trying to install 8.2 on it but can't get past the first boot.  I had a system up and running on it before, but I had to remove a drive and do the install on another computer.  That worked, but now I need to use the built in RAID hardware.  As best as I can tell I am going to have to install on the the actual hardware.  Motherboard is an Arima NM46X.  The machine appears to be about 6 years old.

I have tried to boot the install disk, the live filesystem disk, and the memstick image for FreeBSD 7.0 through 8.2.  All of them do exactly the same thing:

Bootstart starts.

BTX loader lists the drives and memory

FreeBSD bootstrap loader version 1.1 starts.  I get the build date and then a new line with just a '/' on it.  It never begins to spin.  No additional I/O occurs with the boot device.

The memstick and CDs are good.  They boot just fine on another computer, just not this one.  I have had to work around CD issues in the past, but I thought the memstick would work if the BIOS would recognize it and boot from it.  It recognizes it and tries to boot.  I need some ideas here as the RAID is essential for this application.  Thanks,