Problem with s5000PAUl using a SRCS16 in Raid 5 with 5 * 500gig drives

[Paul]

Hello,

I have been having troubles installing the amd64 platform on an Intel 
S5000pal system with the SRCS16 Raid controller using Raid 5 with 5 * 
500gig drives.

In order to get it to install I had to split the raid setup into two 
logical arrays. I guess it was too close to the 2TB limit as it was 
giving me read sector error when booting.

However I now have it booting but it gets stuck at the

Attempting to mount / (the root partition).

This goes on for like 20 minutes and then it finally proceeds. This 
seems odd and clearly is a problem to mount the small / root 
partition that is only a few gigs big.

Does anyone have an idea what is going on here?

I also noticed it with adding a user it added the user but got stuck 
for like 10 minutes before proceeding.

This system has 16GIG of ram using the amd64 platform and has 2 dual 
core cps running.

I installed the centos just to see if there were any problems with 
this operating system (in case this was hardware related) but it 
worked 100% without any fuss. The problem is I want to use Freebsd :) 
So I do not believe this is hardware related.

If anyone reading this has set  up a S5000PAL system can they let me 
know what settings they used to have a successful installation?

Thanks

Paul