FreeBSD-9.1 would not boot on pentium3 laptop

[Mikhail T.]

Hello!

I have an old Dell Latitude C800 laptop (with Pentium3 CPU in it). 
FreeBSD 6.3-STABLE was running fine on it, but I decided to update the 
machine to 9.1-STABLE.

Well, neither my own custom kernel, nor even the official 9.1-RELEASE 
CD1 would boot... In both cases the boot process runs up to detecting 
uhub0, then either hangs forever or shuts off after a short while.

Again, I thought I screwed-up the build, but the official CD would not 
boot either, so here I am.

Flipping through the old CDs I have, the 7.3 hangs at boot similarly 
(after reporting loading the memory image and warning me about 
"dangerously low battery"). The 3.2-STABLE (September 1999) boots fine 
-- and goes into sysinstall.

Freesbie-2.0.1 (which is based on FreeBSD-6.2) booted too.

What happened between 6.x and 7.x? Any ideas? Thanks!

    -mi