new install of 5.2 ISO aft hour system freeze cold reboot only option

[cmustard at nyc.rr.com]

Situation: 

This is a new install of 5.2 ISO from ftp.freebsd.org. (install went fine, 
etc, everything is up and running well,... but) 

Everything runs fine for about an hour and a half then everything freezes ( 
doesnt recognize keyboard, mouse, anything etc ) and i have to do a cold 
reboot ( ouch! ). 
This is in console or in X. (I experienced similiar problems trying to 
run linux on this box, it would get kernel panics, only cold reboot would 
release it.) I do believe this to be related to ACPI but have no proof. 

(i would love to be able to provide more diagnostics or log output but 
there is no output to include, when the system comes back up, all it knows 
is that it was shutdown improperly) 

(I hear the processor fan speed increase alot too, like when i'm compiling 
from source, it's almost like something is overworking the processor and 
wont release it)(side note, i use usb and a kvm switch, i don't think 
that's related though, it seems to work fine) 

This is a relatively new machine but i have seen other posters running 
similiar, so it should run freebsd fine. 
Asus Motherboard for AMD Athlon/XP/Duron Processors, Model# A7N8X Deluxe 
Chipset: NVIDIA nForce2 SPP, nForce2 MCP-T 
AMD Athlon XP 2200+, 266 MHz FSB, 256K Cache Processor 
512MB RAM (Geil). 

I have learned quite a bit by searching the lists which helped the APCI 
problems etc. 
5.2 wont boot 'regular (choice 1)' unless you disable parallel port in 
bios. ( boot process will just hang on Timer miliseconds display output,... 
sorry not with the box, don't remember the exact output ). 

also, i found this: 
> However, I managed to work around these freezes by removing the two 
> SMP-related lines from my kernel configuration: 
> 
> options SMP # Symmetric MultiProcessor Kernel 
> device apic # I/O APIC 

so, i will try that tonight. 

I am hoping someone with a similiar set-up (these are very popular modern 
componets) can share experiances or a bios set up or kernel config, or 
other information. I really want to run freebsd on this box. 


thanks for your time. 

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