Problems booting 5.1 RELEASE and CURRENT on Dell PowerEdge 600SC - workaround

Hi all,

My company has recently purchased a Dell PowerEdge 600SC. I attempted to
install both 5.1 RELEASE and a snapshot from 20030731 - both of which
failed during booting.

The error message was the same as described in the message "CURRENT on
Dell PE600SC panics on boot", from Josh Homan on 2003-04-08 19:36:33.
Since the message is the same I won't duplicate it here.

After a little bit of testing I managed to get the system to boot and
install. The problem seems to be with the CD-ROM attached to the tertiary
IDE channel (which is where Dell attach it by default). Shifting the
CD-ROM onto the secondary channel allowed me to boot and install FreeBSD.
Once installation was complete, I disconnected the CD-ROM altogether (I'm
running 2 HDD's - one on each channel). Unfortunately my "solution" isn't
a fix, it's merely a workaround - but at least it will help anyone else
with the same system to install 5.x.

Glen Gibb
Ridley College