Tyan i7520 mobo problems on FreeBSD 6

[ke.han]

Dear list,
I have been continuing efforts to get the Tyan i7520 mobo to work with 
freeBSD 6.  Here are some of the problems.  I have tried the things 
suggested by others like turning on/off Hyperthreading...no luck.

If I can't find a solution by Monday, I will be forced to pull this mobo 
and buy another.  This is costly, but not compared to the time and face 
I've lost over the past month.  Centos 4.2 installs/works perfect.  So 
this is a problem between freeBSD 6 installer and the mobo, not the mobo 
itself.  freeBSD 5.4 gives my similar problems.

Here are a few of the problems with freeBSD 6 and the tyan i7520:

1 - Floppy not found.  I was able to fix this by turning off the onboard 
SATA.
2 - EIDE or SATA drive connected directly to respective mobo controller 
not found.  I'm not an expert at hints, but I tried a few things and no 
luck.
3 - 3Ware 9550sx card not found.  With the latest not-released 9.3.0.2 
driver called twa_9ksx.ko, I was able to get the module loaded during 
sysinstall and the card was usable and the install completed.  After 
reboot, I entered boot prompt and reloaded the same module and boot but 
this time the card does not work.  Another sided effect of loading this 
module in sysinstall is that after it is loaded, the installer tells me 
it can't find my cdrom to complete the install...yes, the same cdrom I 
have booted the installer with.  But an ftp install from this point worked.

So, I would like any suggestions as to fixing item 3 above or find a 
suitable mobo to replace.  If I end up replacing the mobo I am happy to 
gift the tyan i7520 to a team member that wants to debug with it.

My mobo requirements are straightforward:

1 - Ethernet - two ports, great throughput with _no patches_ for all the 
freeBSD 6 advance networking features: pf, altq, kqueue, polling.  I 
just want it work right "out of the box".
2 - works with my 3ware 9550sx-4lp card.
3 - It would be very nice if the sysinstall recognized my cd and floppy 
with no hints or any other tricks.

thanks, ke han