FreeBSD on old laptop, installer panic

[Zac Berkowitz]

I'm giving FreeBSD a go on my laptop, but I'm running into problems straight 
off the 5.4-STABLE installer.  At first it would hang without an error.  
After I disabled power management in the bios  I got a bit further - now it 
crashes with a panic:
-------------------------------------
pcib0: <intel 82443BX (440 BX) host to PCI bridge> pcibus 0 on motherboard
pir0: <PCI Interrupt Routing Table: 8 Entries> on motherboard
pci0: <PCI bus> on pcib0

Fatal trap 12: page fault while in kernel mode
fault virtual address = 0xeb871
fault code              = supervisor read, page not present
instruction pointer   = 0x8 :0xc00eb757
stack pointer          = 0x10 :0xc1020a0
frame pointer          = 0x10 :0xc1020a0
code segment         = base 0x0, limit 0xfffff, type 0x1b
                            = DPL 0, pres 1, def32 1, IOPL = 0
processor eflags      = interrupt enabled, resume, IOPL = 0
current process       = 0
trap number            =12

panic: page fault
--------------------------------------------

Some googling with the fault virtual address turned up a few pages, but none 
in english and seemingly none coming to a solution.  lspci -v in linux gives 
me

-------------------------------------
0000:00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corp. 440BX/ZX/DX - 82443BX/ZX/DX AGP bridge 
(rev 03) (prog-if 00 [Normal decode])
        Flags: bus master, 66MHz, medium devsel, latency 0
        Bus: primary=00, secondary=01, subordinate=01, sec-latency=0
        I/O behind bridge: 00008000-00009fff
        Memory behind bridge: d8000000-dfffffff
        Prefetchable memory behind bridge: d0000000-d7ffffff
-------------------------------------

Any ideas?  Usually my *NIX give me panics /after/ I get through installing 
them : p

-Zac