The following tips and tricks may help you turn a failing (or failed) installation attempt into a success. Please read them carefully. Hardware conflict or misconfiguration

Problem: A device is conflicting with another or does not match the kernel's compiled-in IRQ or address. Cause: While most device drivers in FreeBSD are now smart enough to match themselves to your hardware settings dynamically, there are a few that still require fairly rigid configuration parameters to be compiled in (and matched by the hardware) before they will work. We are working hard to eliminate as many of these last hold-outs as we can, but it is not always as easy as it looks. Solution: There are several possible solutions. The first, and easiest, is to boot the kernel with the -c flag. When you see the initial boot prompt (from floppy or hard disk), type: /kernel -c This will boot just past the memory sizing code and then drop into a dynamic kernel configuration utility. Type `?' at the prompt to see a list of commands. You can use this utility to reset the IRQ, memory address, IO address or a number of other device configuration parameters. You can also disable a device entirely if it is causing problems for other devices you would much rather have work. Another solution is, obviously, to remove the offending hardware or simply strip the system down to the bare essentials until the problem (hopefully) goes away. Once you are up, you can do the same thing mentioned above---compile a kernel more suited to your hardware, or incrementally try to figure out what it was about your original hardware configuration that did not work. When I boot for the first time, it still looks for /386bsd!

Cause: You still have the old FreeBSD 1.x boot blocks on your boot partition. Solution: You should re-enter the installation process, invoke the (F)disk editor and chose the (W)rite option. This will not hurt an existing installation and will make sure that the new boot blocks get written to the drive. If you are installing for the first time, do not forget to (W)rite out your new boot blocks! :-)