Hard Drive Problems Freebsd 4.9 to 5.2

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Hi all,
 
Still pretty new to this Freebsd thing, Yesterday I attempted to install Freebsd on my alpha box 164LX 533mhz. Loaded with 6 hard drives right now. When I did the install with 5.2 It would show all 6 drives but only allow me to partition one drive, not allowing me access to the remaining drives. I tried this several times and it also crashed a couple of times with something about a type 11 error. I thought maybe this was just the instability of 5.2 so I d/l 4.9 and gave it a go. It worked better but only shows 5 of my 6 drives, but it allowed me to partition those 5. Anybody know whats going on here??? Is this a problem with 5.2, a newbie mistake?? is something wrong with my setup?? any help would be greatly appreciated...
 
many thx
-j