4.9 installation woes (on thinkpad 560X)

[David Gerard]

I was advised by a few people (including the laptop's previous owner) that
FreeBSD 5.x would be quite difficult to get working with sound, and that
it would be a better idea to try with 4.9.

I have just spent a few hours carefully reinstalling the laptop with FreeBSD 
4.9. Restart for its first boot ... and it won't. It sits there at

     F1  DOS
     F2  FreeBSD

     Default: F2 _

and seems to consider the keyboard beneath its notice. Odd, since the caps 
lock light goes on and off as expected. But nothing will get it off this screen.

The DOS partition is a 20 meg partition for IBM system tools, as yet not 
installed. It's also before the FreeBSD partition on the disk, if that's
relevant.

Is there anything I can do apart from starting over? (And how to make sure
it doesn't do this again?)


- d.