Mountroot prompt on a new install of 6.2 - Tecra M3 Centrino

[Walter Cangemi]

Good Evening,
I installed 6.0 a while back on this same machine (Toshiba Tecra M3 -
Centrino based), no particular issues to report.
I had to take out BSD and work with another combination of OSes for about a
year, and now it's time for me to reinstall BSD as the main OS. I therefore
attempted to do a fresh install of 6.2, got the infamous message about
corrected drive geometry right before proceeding with disk partitioning, and
moved forward with installation since I've seen that message in previous
installations and never had anomalies.

This time, however, the installation is acting strangely. It randomly goes
to the "mountroot>" prompt when booted in normal mode, even though 'fstab'
is correctly set to boot from '/dev/ad0s3a'. When I try to type the correct
root partition at the 'mountroot' prompt, it will refuse to boot from it and
restart the laptop if I press another key. This same behaviour happens
randomly when I boot in Single User Mode. Safe Mode appears to be the only
mode that correctly boots to a prompt. I have not been able to reproduce the
issue in a consistent manner to share with you what might be triggering
this.

I also downloaded a whole new ISO and burned it on another CD from another
burner (you see here that I am becoming paranoid) but the results,
unfortunately, are the same.

Just in case it might help, here are a few more details on the Disk
configuration + hardware specifications:

- 'ad0s1a' is NTFS and is hosting WinXP
- 'ad0s2a' is FAT32 for plain storage
- 'ad0s3a' is FreeBSD

The Laptop is Centrino-based with a Pentium-M (Sonoma Core, 533FSB).
The HDD I am using is an early model Hitachi HTS726060M9AT00, 60GB 7200rpm.
A copy of the Laptop specs can be viewed here:
http://cs.fiu.edu/~wcang001/bs/TecraM3_specs.pdf
An output of 'dmesg' I collected one of the times it booted correctly can be
viewed here: http://www.cs.fiu.edu/~wcang001/fBSD/TecraM3_dmesg

If you need any further details, by all means let me know.

Thank you in advance!

-Walter