8.2-amd64 install cannot find HDD?

Attempting to install from the 8.2-amd64 DVD ISO, burned to disk. I get as far as the sysinstaller main menu, then instantly get the "No disks found!" dialog box when I try to start any of the installs. Alt-F2 and Scroll-Lock get me to what look like probe results, which doesn't seem to have anything about the HDD or DVD, only the 4 removable-media devices, for which media cannot be found (correctly).

Since I can't get the OS running, I don't have the output of dmesg to share. Setting the "Debugging" option in the Options Editor doesn't help; the problem has already happened by the time I can turn this option on. I've tried the "Re-scan Devices" option, which gets me the "Probing devices..." message, which has been showing for about an hour now (please define "a while").

The system is an HP desktop (p6709c), which has an Intel Core i5 2300 (4 cores), 4GB of DRAM, and an "Intel Cougar Point" chipset on its "Cleveland" (Pegatron) M/B. The "Intel Cougar Point" chipset provides the PCI bridge, the USB controller, the ISA bridge, the SMBus and the 6-port SATA AHCI controller. The disk controller fronts a 1TB HDD and the DVD drive I'm using to boot FreeBSD from physical installation media.

No, it's not the "Cougar Point" chip bug. The system came with Windows 7, and the first thing I did was reformat the disk and install Fedora 15 on it, which is working fine (but isn't what I need next). Having a working Fedora installation means (to me) my problem isn't broken hardware, and also means I can access the PCI bus and the HDD from another OS.

FreeBSD SVN commit 212193 to the stable-8 source tree back in Sep 2010 suggests this chipset is supported. I'm stumped on what to try next and would appreciate any suggestions...
 
Follow-up info...

The BIOS has the disk set for AHCI (not IDE, not RAID) mode.

The May 2011 FreeBSD 9.0-CURRENT amd64 image installs fine.
 
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