Problems booting FreeBSD on a Compaq Pavillion V6107au

[Peter Jeremy]

I would like to install FreeBSD on a V6107 (Turion 64x2) but have run
into various problems.  It is based around an nVIDIA nFORCE chipset -
the MPtable reports as "nVIDIA C51-MCP51".

Booting 6.2-RELEASE (either i386 or amd64) hangs after the probe
message for ad4 (the SATA HDD).  Verbose mode shows it gets as far
as reporting "GEOM: new disk ad4".  The scroll lock key works but
scroll up/down is very dodgy - pressing the button several times
sometimes makes the screen scroll (generally several pages).
Similar behaviour occurs on 6.0-RELEASE and 6.1-RELEASE.

Disabling kbdmux in the loader has no effect on 6.1 or 6.2 - it
still hangs.

Disabling ACPI causes 6.1 and 6.2 to panic.  In the case of 6.2,
I got a "page fault in kernel mode" at 0xdc4e with ip=0x70:0x9717
(which looks like 16-bit protected mode to me).

Disabling ACPI in 6.0 lets me start sysinstall and enter Fixit mode.
Unfortunately, 6.0 doesn't recognize the internal ethernet (it's
an nve in 6.2).  I need to have network access before I can continue
so this isn't much help either.

Any suggestions on what to try next?

FWIW, KNOPPIX 3.3 won't run either.  It reports various errors
attempting to uncompress cloop and eventually hangs.

-- 
Peter Jeremy
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