Freeze During Boot With 6.2-RELEASE Install Disk

[alex at schnarff.com]

I've got a machine that I'm trying to get 6.2-RELEASE installed on, in 
order to act as a backup/test config server for a production box I have 
running the same version of FreeBSD. The machine previously had 
5.3-RELEASE on a single SCSI disk, with a 4-drive SATA RAID that wasn't 
quite working right (according to the previous owner; I just got the 
system a few days ago); unfortunately, the system now refuses to 
recognize the SCSI disk, even in the Adaptec SCSI card's BIOS.

That said, when I pop in my 6.2-RELEASE boot disk, it comes up, loads 
devices, sees the SATA RAID...and then just hangs. I've tried booting 
in safe mode and with verbose logging...and it won't work either way, 
and I get no error messages.

FWIW, I took the same boot CD and popped it into an Acer laptop I had 
handy, and it went straight into the system setup menus, asking me to 
choose a country; so the CD itself seems unlikely to be the culprit. 
Additionally, I popped an OpenBSD 3.9 boot CD into the freezing 
machine, and it came right up to an install prompt -- though it saw the 
SATA disks as individual entities, and not a RAID.

Does anyone have any clue what might be causing this, and/or how to 
solve it? I'll be happy to provide additional details, I'm just not 
sure what would be helpful right now.

Thanks in advance for any help you can provide.

Alex Kirk