5.0 boot, hanging @ "Timecounters tick ..."

[John Reddy]

I've been running 4.7 happily on it for a while and decided to test out 
5.0.  I was able to boot and do a complete install from the floppies 
(kern.flp and mfsroot.flp but not the drivers.flp).  Upon reboot, however, 
the system hangs.  The system is a Gateway 2000, E-4200 w/ 256MB ram, and a 
3Com 3c905B 10/100 card.

Proceeding through the boot process, the last output is:
---
vga0: <GEneric ISA VGA> at port 0x3c0-0x3df iomem 0xa0000-0xbffff on isa0
Timecounters tick every 10.000 msec
---

The systems simply stops booting there.  I've tried "boot -v" for extra 
information and gotten the same result after this output:

---
isa_probe_children: probing PnP devices
BIOS Geometries:
  0:030efe3f 0..782=783 cylinders, 0..254=255 heads, 1..63=63 sectors
  0 accounted for
Device configuration finished.
procfs registered
Timecounters tick every 10.000 msec
lo0: bpf attached
---

Does anyone have any suggestions about how to handle this headache, or 
should I just go back to the 4.x track with the computer?

-John Reddy                                     ph 703.676.5998
  Sr. Network Engineer                           fx 703.749.9515
  Law Enforcement Online (leo.gov)               em jreddy at leo.gov