Proliant 1600R Install Failure (ida + SMPng to blame?)

Good day all,

I have a Compaq Proliant 1600R equipped with dual Pentium 2 processors,
ECC RAM and a Compaq Smart Array 2DH controller (which uses the ida
driver). This machine has been working well with FreeBSD 4.8 and has
been tracking the RELENG_4_8 tree without problems. Because running
mySQL on 4.8 with SMP is flaky at best, I've been trying to update to
5.X. Sadly, every attempt to do so fails miserably, leading me to
believe that there's something going on above my head.

Booting off the 5.1 boot floppies gives a page fault about 15 seconds
after the mfsroot floppy finishes loading. I know what everyone's going
to suggest - hardware - bad RAM or cache. I've run Memtest86
(http://www.memtest86.com/) for the complete suite of tests and it has
found no errors. This, plus the fact that 4.8 worked flawlessly leads me
to believe that this is not a hardware issue. I also tried remaking the
boot disks with fresh floppies, using rawrite instead of fdimage. I get
the same results with both methods. Following this I burned an ISO and
booted from that - same thing.

Here's the message from the panic:

------------------------------------------------------------------------
--
....

sio1: type 16550A
vga0: <Generic ISA VGA> at port 0x3e0-0x3df iomem 0xa0000-0xbffff on
isa0

Timecounters tick every 10.000 msec

Fatal trap 12: page fault while in kernel mode
fault virtual address = 0x5c
fault code = supervisor read, page not present
instruction pointer = 0x8:0xc01a6ed7
stack pointer = 0x10:0xd6b6dc70
frame pointer = 0x10:0xd6b6dc7c
code segment = base 0x0, limit 0xfffff, type 0x1b
             = DPL 0, pres 1, def32 1, gran 1
processor eflags = interrupt enabled, resume, IOPC = 0
current process = 4 (g_down)
trap number = 12
panic: page fault

...
------------------------------------------------------------------------
--


I decided to try another approach: doing a CVSup from RELENG_4_8 to
RELENG_5_1 and then remaking world and the kernel. The CVSup works well,
but about an hour and a bit into make buildworld I get errors in
libpthread and the make dies.

Note that I followed the instructions in the Handbook and the
src/UPDATING file to the letter.

>From what I've heard and seen at http://www.freebsd.org/projects/busdma/
I gather that the ida driver is not ready for SMPng, but regardless. I
should at least be able to get into sysinstall, shouldn't I? Does the
5.1 GENERIC kernel even use SMP?

The release notes for 5.1 make no special mention of any issues that
should affect me and all my hardware appears as being supported in the
hardware notes for 5.1.

Does anyone have further suggestions for me? Has anyone else got a
similar hardware setup which works?

I'm rather desperate for help - any suggestions are welcome.

Thanks,
Ed Aronyk