I've been having some trouble with nforce motherboard and
FreeBSD-5.2.1-CURRENT as well. The only combinations that I have found
to work consistently are disabling ACPI with hw.acpi.0.disabled="1"
and
either no PM or using apm, or enabling ACPI and APIC disabled with
hw.apic.0.disabled="1". This solution would not work for SMP kernel.
I'm not sure of the exact problem but there seems to be an irq
sharing issue when both ACPI and APIC are enabled. These coexisted with
11/2003 5.1 but as of 5.2.1 there have been problems for me. Onbord
Lan, USB, and either ACPI or APIC cannot coexist.
There was also an issue with using multiple drives per
ide-controller. No problem with a drive per controller, but add optical
drive and hard-drive on same controller and all I got was fs corruption
and r/w timeouts. BIOS upgrade improved r/w timeouts, so that it took
less time to find out data was corrupted.