Difficulty booting 8.0.4, 64 bit

[ctphillips]

Hello...

I'm new to FreeNAS, but have some experience with FreeBSD. I am trying to boot the 64 bit FreeNAS 8.0.4 on a SuperMicro X7DCL-3 motherboard. I have a single Xeon processor, 6 GB of RAM installed and 4 SATA drives attached (for now). I can install FreeNAS from a CD to my Kingston 8 GB thumb drive with no trouble. However, when FreeNAS boots, it freezes/hangs/stops dead when it identifies the first hard drive (ada0). I have changed the hard drive, tried changing BIOS settings and reverting to the default BIOS settings, nothing works.

I would like to update the BIOS on this board, but I'm having difficulty with that as well. That's a story for SuperMicro support though.

[ctphillips]

I figured out my own problem. My optical drive, a Sony Optiarc AD7590A was flagged as a "slave" drive with no master. I changed it to master, re-installed FreeNAS -- and it still froze during boot. However, when I disconnected the drive from the motherboard, FreeNAS began booting normally. I also disconnected the floppy drive at the same time, but I'm pretty sure it's the DVD drive that was the culprit. Could this be some sort of driver issue?