Unable to boot from bootable drive with 4.8 or 4.9

[sirgeek-freebsdquestion at mrsucko.org]

I've been running FreeBSD for a while now ( since 2.2.2 ) and I have never 
seen this issue before.  I recently had upgraded a server of mine from a 
K6-2/350 to an Athlon 550 and a FIC SD11 mother board.  I had swapped the 
old HD into the new system.  Now the hard drive doesn't boot automatically.  
You have to hit enter or space periodically until it starts.  It is running 
4.8 

That hard drive is starting to have some issues so I went to install from 
scratch a new OS onto a new HD in the system  I chose 4.9 since it is a 
production server ( for mail and apache ). 

This drive ALSO will not boot without manual intervention. 

The drives are recognized happily by BIOS and by FreeBSD.  And once it gets 
past the "FreeBSD 4.8-RELEASE #0: Thu Apr  3 10:53:38 GMT 2003" screen it 
runs fine by itself. 

Is there any athlon hardware that just doesn't play happily with FreeBSD ? 

The system runs linux just fine ( The mobo and CPU and RAM came from a linux 
system that I upgraded ). 

Any and all help/suggestions are appreciated.