A bug or something else?

[Onyx]

Having an odd problem with a finnicky Toshiba Satellite notebook. The hard disc isn't recognized when booting from the install CD , and sysinstall reports "No disks found!" as soon as it gets to the partition editor. I've tried it with a few different versions of FreeBSD, including 6.3-RELEASE and 7.0-CURRENT (A while back), 7.0-RELEASE, and 8.0-CURRENT with mostly the same results. NetBSD chokes here as well. Debian GNU/Linux 4 installs OK. Is this a bug or is there something I can do to fix it?