[a thing]

Even on the first install disk, FreeBSD 5.4-RELEASE won't get passed booting the kernel. It stops at:

acd0:CDRW <NEC CD-RW NR-9200A/1.01> at ata1-master PIO4
acd1:DVDROM <LITEON DVD-ROM LTD 1630/GHR3> at ata1-slave PIO4
[cursor]

Num lock, caps lock and scroll lock all work.

This started when I booted my FreeBSD installation with a vfat formatted floppy that had a tar.bz2 of all of Fedora's /etc/X11 and one of things that looked relevant since I noticed there was nothing in /etc/X11 on FreeBSD which could be why X didn't start.

The disk is very clean and not scratched.

I've tried taking out and unplugging everything possible and booting with ACPI disabled and safe mode.

Oh yeah, is defragging necessary on BSD?

[darkprince]

looks like it has problems with your DVD-ROM
acd1VDROM <LITEON DVD-ROM LTD 1630/GHR3> at ata1-slave PIO4

as for disk degrafmentation : no need for FBSD

try hitting ctrl 'c' when it gets to this point and see if you can skip over this DVDROM

[a thing]

Pressing CTRL+C anywhere doesn't do anything.

EDIT: I opened up my box, removed some dust, attempted to unplug my DVD drive, then it worked o.O