Unable to install

[Kenneth Shipman]

I can maker it to 'fraustrated', but not quite to Newbie.
I'm a long time Windows developer & thought that I'd put FreeBSD on one of 
my systems & play with it to see if I liked it. If I did, turn it into a new 
file server.
I can't even get the install disks to boot. I guess what I'm asking for is 
HELP before I get too frustrated & throw the towel in on BSD.

When I use floppies it errors out with an elf32 read error on KERN1 disk. 
I've formatted & tried multiple floppies to make sure it wasn't the floppy 
itself. I was able to make it as far as sysinstall about a week ago on the 
same machine. but I stopped to finish building it. At that time I had a 
single 450 CPU & no other OS. I've also put in a new floppy drive since 
then.

When I try the ISO CD install it isn't recognised on my SCSI drive, but 
starts for a few seconds on the CDROM in Master position on my 2nd IDE 
channel. It prints out about two lines (goes by super quick) that says 
something to the effect that 'loader found'. The same CD will boot up into 
sysinstall on a different machine without problems.

Note that I do change my BIOS boot sequence as needed. I've already 
installed MSDOS 6.2 & Windows 2000 Pro. That went perfect without a hitch.
PnP OS & ACPI are turned off in the BIOS.


Here's the system:
Soyo SY-D6IBA motherboard with Dual Pentium III 550s (could dual CPUs be the 
problem?)
Award Modular PCI/PNP 686 BIOS  4.51 w/ PnP 1.0A extension
512mb ram
AGP slot: NVidea TNT Model 64 v2.05.13
PCI 1: Linksys LNE100TX NIC
PCI 4: Promise SX4000 Raid Controller with 4 Maxtor 300gb Diamondmax 10 
drives. Two of which are in a raid 1 configuration with an NTFS partition. 
The other 2 empty/unallocated. 256 mb ram.
ISA : SoundBlaster AWE64 Gold
balance of slots are empty.
New Samsung 3.5" floppy

IDE Channel 1 Master: Western Digital WD Caviar  13.6GB HDD which has both 
my MSDOS & W2K OS partitions.
IDE Channel 1 Slave: Maxtor DiamondMax 10 300GB PATA 133 HDD - 1 partition - 
planned location for FreeBSD 5.3
IDE Channel 2 Master: Phillips CDD3610/81 CD-ROM  CD-R/RW. This is the one 
used when the installer reboots in an infinite loop.
IDE Channel 2 Slave: Western Digital WD Caviar 80GB HDD - unallocated yet

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Sincerely,
Ken Shipman