Awkward booting issue

Hi,

I have been trying to get FreeBSD 9 amd64 to boot on my 1U server
but am unsuccesful and am out of ideas.

I tried to boot the iso from CD-ROM, I tried multiple USB memory
sticks and I even tried to boot from hard discs, I'll explain this
further below.

Oddly enough every boot attempt fails. Right after the hard discs are
recognised the system just sits there, silent, with no errors. The last
messages I see tell me that three hard discs are found and the very
last message is something like "ada2: previously was known as ad14" and
then... nothing happens. Verbose mode tells me nothing extra.

So I tried to boot with ACPI disabled but this crashes the kernel and
forces a reboot. I tried to disable the USB controller from the bios. I
tried to boot from the hard discs in AHCI or IDE mode. I even unplugged
everything from the motherboard except the essentials and 2G RAM. And I
toggled and changed all BIOS options to no avail.

The motherboard is an MSI MS-9656, the variant without IPMI. It has an
Intel Q9600 processor.

As a workaround I installed a third hard disc, installed Xen onto
that with ArchLinux as dom0. Fortunately this does boot. So then I
assigned the original two hard discs to the FreeBSD 9 VM. I gave the VM
all available memory and three cores, and eth0 is bridged with the
FreeBSD VM.

After FreeBSD was installed I updated it to 9-STABLE, compiled the
kernel (an unmodified GENERIC) and world. It still only boots when it's
a virtual machine. If I try to boot the two hard discs (a mirrored
zfs root) directly i.e. without Xen I still have exactly the same
issues so I do see the bootloader and the first part of the boot
process. It just gets stuck after the ada2 message.

Here is the lspci output from Linux:

# lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 3200/3210 Chipset DRAM Controller (rev 01)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 3200/3210 Chipset Host-Primary PCI Express Bridge (rev 01)
00:19.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82566DM-2 Gigabit Network Connection (rev 02)
00:1a.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #4 (rev 02)
00:1a.7 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #2 (rev 02)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) PCI Express Port 1 (rev 02)
00:1c.4 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) PCI Express Port 5 (rev 02)
00:1d.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #1 (rev 02)
00:1d.1 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #2 (rev 02)
00:1d.2 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #3 (rev 02)
00:1d.7 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #1 (rev 02)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 PCI Bridge (rev 92)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801IR (ICH9R) LPC Interface Controller (rev 02)
00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation 82801IR/IO/IH (ICH9R/DO/DH) 6 port SATA Controller [AHCI mode] (rev 02)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) SMBus Controller (rev 02)
03:00.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82573L Gigabit Ethernet Controller
04:02.0 VGA compatible controller: XGI Technology Inc. (eXtreme Graphics Innovation) Z7/Z9 (XG20 core)
04:03.0 IDE interface: Integrated Technology Express, Inc. IT8213 IDE Controller

I hope we can solve this problem so I can use FreeBSD natively. Thanks
up front for helping me with this issue.

Mark