spent time today beating an HP Kayak into submission re a FreeBSD install. after much faffing with cables and half-inching of memory i finally got the thing to boot in a vaguely happy sort of way. then installed FreeBSD 4.3 via FTP from the dutch mirror, and rebooted... all i got was 'missing operating sysytem'. eventually after reading much fbsd documentation i found out that the bios had been set for DOS type large disk, which means (i think) that fbsd gets incorrect geometry information. anyhoo, i changed this, and am now re-installing. a number of other discoveries, the Custom option on the installation screen is quite nice, allows more flexibility than the standard one. also fbsd seems to have detected that there are two graphics cards in there which is part of the way to a double headed system. just need to get Xfree86 4 to play nicely. calling it zaphod for obvious reasons :)