Help upgrading 4.4 Release - 4.8 Stable

[Gregory Norman]

Hello

I'm trying to upgrade from 4.4 Release to 4.8 Stable. Everything goes 
well until I reboot after building and installing my custom kernel. This 
machine is a gateway, nat, ipfw. I will also install MySQL, Apache,  and 
PHP4 after upgrading.  Prior to upgrading everything worked fine.

When I reboot it hangs after:
ppi0: <Parallel I/O> on ppbus0

I have a copy of my previous kernel and can boot up using it.

Here is a snippet of the probe showing where it fails:
sio at port 0x2f8-0x2ff irq 3 on isa 0
sio1:type 16550a
ppc0:<Parallel port> at port 0x378-0x37f irq 7 on isa0
ppc0: Generic chipset (NIBBLE-only) in COMPATIBLE mode
lpt0:<Printer> on ppbus 0
lpt0:Interrupt-driven por
ppi0:<Parallel I/O> on ppbus0		#it hangs here and fail.

It seem as though the probe fail while searching for dummynet. After 
ppi0:<Parallel I/O> on ppbus0 during a successful boot system probe shows
DUMMYNET initialized (xxxxxx)
IP packet filtering initialized, divert enabled, rule-based forwarding 
disabled,.....


According to UPDATING there were changes made with dummynet, bridging 
and ipfw  between 4.4 Release and 4.8 Stable. I tried commenting 
dummynet and bridging in my custom kernel, rebuilding and installing the 
kernel with those changes. A 4.8 Stable boot still fail at the same 
place.

A kernel with ppi0<Parallel I/O> on ppbus0 disabled does not work  
either. I have not been able to find a solution by searching google, and 
FreeBSD.org either. I have reinstalled the entire OS, starting from a 
clean install of 4.4 Release, still no success.

Any help, suggestion, pointers, or ideas would be appreciated.

i386

Gregory