[PC-BSD Support] PC-BSD 8.0 Can't see my hard drives

[Steve Williams]

Hi all. I originally posted a thread on the forum, but was recommended 
by a user there to post my problem here.  Here is the thread link to the 
forum,
http://forums.pcbsd.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=15265&sid=8537f9c313f5085b435fc9bdb48be865

The problem I am having is that I cannot install PCBSD because it cannot 
see my hard drives.

My system is
  ASUS M3A78 Pro Mother board
AMD Phenom x4 @ 2600 MHz chip
6144 MB Ram
3x WD hard drives 320, 500 and 500 GB
NVidia GE force 7300 le Video card
The OS at the moment is Vista 64 bit with XP in dual boot using freebsd


When I start the install process a message comes up when it is reading 
my hard drives " Attempt to Query device size failed : Not ready, medium 
not present"
Then when I get to the section to select which hard drive to install on 
it only shows my USB external drive, My USB printer as a drive and the 
card reader as 4 drives, but no hard drives.
So far I have updated my BIOS to the latest version, and changed the 
type of disk controller from IDE to AHCI, but that did not work, and 
Vista could not then see the hard drive either so I had to change it 
back to IDE, although the disks are in fact SATA.

I forgot to mention that this is a copy of PCBSD that was ordered from 
the website as I only have a 2Gig monthly download allowance and very 
slow broadband.
I hope that someone has come across this before and can offer some advice.
I loaded PCBSD 8.0 onto an old sandbox and it worked fine on that, so 
there is nothing wrong with the install disk.

Thanks in advance
Steve