FreeBSD won't boot after install (Possible Disk Geometry problem?)

[Gabriel Levy]

Hello,

I've loved FreeBSD since I torture-tested it as a web server several years 
ago and found it could easily handle about 10 times the number of 
concurrent connections as red hat with perfect stability and incredibly 
frugal memory usage. I desperately want to use it for our new web/database 
server but I am at the end of my installation rope here, so any help would 
be much appreciated.

Attempting to install FreeBSD 5.3-Release on (all brand new):

P4 3.2Ghz Hyperthreaded
ECS 848P-A motherboard
Phoenix AwardBIOS v6.00
1 Gig DDR RAM
WD800JB Western Digital 80GB HDD
D-Link DGE-530T Gigabit Ethernet card

My BIOS reports the disk geometry as 38309/16/255 in setup with access mode 
set to "Auto." I make one slice, using the whole disk, and use the 
automatic label/partitions.  Fdisk complains that the disk geometry of 
155061/16/63 is incorrect and chooses 9729/255/63. I set the partition as 
active and choose to use an MBR.The FTP install goes by without a hitch and 
upon reboot I get "Non-system disk or disk error" and the system will not boot.

Changing the disk access mode in the BIOS to "LBA" causes my BIOS to detect 
the geometry as 9729/255/63 which I was sure would solve my problems. FDISK 
still complains that 155061/16/63 is incorrect and chooses 9729/255/63. 
Install continues just as before and I get the same problem on reboot.

Any ideas? After wasting a whole day on this yesterday, I figured maybe 
somebody here can help.

Thanks,
Gabe Levy