FreeBSD 9.1 won't boot after install

[James E. Pace]

Hi,

I bought an HP Pavilion p7-1597c [1] system last week.  It is Intel Core
i5-3330, with a Seagate 1.5 TB SATA drive and 12 GB of memory, shipped with
Windows 8.

I have disabled Secure Boot and enabled Legacy device booting.

I am able to complete the install of FreeBSD 9.1/amd64 from the CD without
any problems.  However, when I attempt to boot, it doesn't.

Originally I was trying to dual boot with Win 8, but eventually I rendered
Win8 unbootable.  So, now I have given FreeBSD the whole disk.  I have done
the standard install.  I found instructions to have the install use MBR
(instead of GPT), but that also doesn't work.

After an install, I get to the boot0 (the F1 boot menu thing) screen, but
when it tries to boot, it prints "#" and doesn't boot.  When trying to
share the disk with Windows, mostly I'd get boot errors about not having a
bootable device (ERROR: No boot disk has been detected or the disk has
failed.).

In the BIOS setting, I've tried both IDE and AHCI in "Storage Options ->
SATA emulation".

PC-BSD 9.1 has the same results.  It installs fine, but resets after
selecting something at the boot0 prompt.

FreeBSD 8.4 wouldn't install because the installer didn't have device node
for /dev/ad4s1b in /dev in order to create the filesystems.  I haven't
spent any time figuring out what's going on here. [Using the Standard
Installer, accepted the message about geometry, told it to use the whole
disk, use the standard boot manager, used the auto-default filesystems,
told it to go...]

Ubuntu Linux works.
OpenBSD works.
NetBSD works.
Fedora Linux works.

I've been a FreeBSD user for about 16 years, so I really want this to work.

Does anyone have suggestions about what else I should try?

Thanks,

James

[1]
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.jsp?objectID=c03704551&lang=en&cc=us&taskId=101&contentType=SupportFAQ&prodSeriesId=5330777

-- 
James E. Pace