Compaq PL5000

[Robert Slade]

Hi,

I've have been running Fedora for a couple of months and wanted to move
to a more stable OS and was recommended BSD.

I have an old Proliant 5000 server (Quad Processors, 1GByte Memory, Raid
array) that I have been using as a test system. I have just tried to
install Free BSD 5.3 on it and ran into problems, 

If I allow the default at the 1st screen, the machine hangs at:

pci2: <PCI bus> on pcib2

trying the other options eg with acpi support, safe mode etc I get a
kernal panic:

cpu0 on motherboard
make device: can't find device vt

Fatal trap 12: page fault while in kernal mode
Etc

panic: page fault

I note that during boot only 16Mbyte of memory is recognised. I had this
problem with Fedora etc which lead to a kernal panic. I guess that this
is the same problem as above. In that case I was able to correct this by
adding mem=1008M as a kernal parameter during boot. I cannot see how to
do that with Free BSD. Is this possible with Free BSD or am I barking up
the wrong tree with this problem?

Rob