compaq 6515b turion x2 laptop

[rar102 at ra.msstate.edu]

I recently bought a new laptop.  I have been unsuccesful in installing FreeBSD
(or any alternatives for that matter) onto it.  I wonder if I can get some
help.  I have tried to:

1.  install the FreeBSD amd64 7.0 release.  Stopped at a "No disks found!"
prompt.  With a little bit googling, I see that FreeBSD has been successfully
installed onto ST9120822AS hard drive.

2.  run the latest Knoppix on it (just to see if the Debian i386 Linux flavors
can do it).  Hangs on detecting hard drive.  To be honest, I want BSD if I can
use it, anyway.

3.  install the FreeBSD 7-stable amd64 April snapshot.  Same result as #1.

4.  install NetBSD amd 4.0-release.  Gives a disk geometry warning but installs
without much further ado.  In fact, I am still using NetBSD's bootloader.  It
boots both Vista and NetBSD.  But...  when I boot into NetBSD, it overheats,
panics and dies within a minute.  Trolling the internet again, I see that I am
not the only one that has run into this problem.  It is not running long enough
to try an ftp install.  I would like to not burn up this motherboard and I
don't see any NetBSD snapshot iso's to see if they have resolved this problem.

5.  install the FreeBSD i386 7.0 release.  Installer complains about disk
geometry.  At the partitioning screen I press 'g' ('Set Disk Geometry').  I
previously used Vista's magic partition resizer to leave me some space.  I tell
the sysintall to format that empty space as ufs2 and press 'q' ('Quit' out the
disk partitioning step of sysintall).  At this point, it pops up a message that
my partitions are not starting on disk boundaries.  I aborted the install at
that point.  It may still work.  I just don't know.  I would rather

6.  install the FreeBSD i386 7-stable April snapshot.  Same result as #1 and #3.
 This was kind of strange.  I would have expected the same result as #5.

Any suggestions???

RAR