Gateway M305X

[Joe Altman]

I have the laptop mentioned in the subject line, and for several weeks
now I have tried to install FreeBSD on it. I have tried several
releases, from 4.6 up to 5.2 RC1.

They have all failed. Each failure is different for each release; some
releases differ (to my eye) wildly from others; some are almost
identical.

In only one case was I able to get to the /stand/sysinstall screens;
that install failed due to what I recall as a geometry issue. It was
for an earlier release, and I only got that far because I futzed with
the geometry in the BIOS.

The most common failures are all ones mentioned here recently, notably
for 5.x candidates the double fault error posted here this month; this
error(the syntax of mine may be slightly different, but it is very
similar)[1]:

"ad0: READ command timeout tag=0 serv=0 - resetting"

I've also seen errors related to cbb.

I have tried various fixes suggested to others here, but no joy.

To me, the kicker is this: on a whim, I decided to try to install
NetBSD 1.6.1. Does it surprise anyone that the basic NetBSD system
installed without a hitch? I didn't try very hard to install X. I
noted that Net uses wd0, not ad0.

I noticed in my reading that Warner Losh does things NetBSD related,
so I thought my experience might be useful information, especially if
some code is shared between the two projects. I have all of the dmesg
output, two scanpci dumps, and fdisk/mbrlabel output from NetBSD.

Is there a chance that a review of one or more of these things by a
more experienced eye might indicate a course of action for me?

Thanks for any help, or suggestions.

[1] I don't know how to capture to text such things, because in all
failures the machine pretty much hangs before the kernel boot...