ATA problems with FreeBSD 5.4

[Joao Carlos Mendes Luis]

Hi,

     I have already installed FreeBSD 5.4 in lots of hardware, but now I 
came to one that is troublig me.

     It an ASUS motherboard, model P4VP-MX, with VIA8235 Chipset. 
Neither the FreeBSD 5.4-RELEASE CD, nor a preinstalled hard disk can 
identify the ATA disks in this computer.  During the hard disk probe the 
kernel sends some messages, "ata0-master: failure - ATA_IDENTIFY timed 
out", "ata0-master: failure - ATA_IDENTIFY timed out", and them no hard 
disk is identified, so I cannot install the system.  If I boot from a 
pre-installed hard disk, its even worse, after these message, I get a 
"kernel trap 12 with interrupts disabled", but I must confess that this 
hard disk does not have a GENERIC kernel anymore.

     The CPU is a P4 2.0GHz, with 512M DDR, if this matters.  I cannot 
provide a memory dump, because there is no device to dump at.

     Also, note that Fedora 3 and Windows XP Home run on this hardware 
without any trouble.

     Thanks for any help,

		Jonny

PS: Please CC: me in the answers as I do not currently subscribe to 
-stable.  Thanks.