I can't get a bootable install off one particular box and I'm hoping
someone can help.

The disk probe on boot is returning a mode sense "too large to make
sense" message (or similar -- I'm working from memory.) The number
cylinders picked up in sysinstall are, in fact, too large. (Something
in excess of 33,000) Changing the geometry in sysinstall has no
effect.

1.5.2, 1.5.3 and current behave the same. There is no DOS mbr on the
disk. Since the problem seems to be the information the drive is
returning, do I have a hopless situation, or is there a solution?

The following is what is seen by FreeBSD (17930694 sectors is
accurate):

BIOS Geometries:
 0:03fefe3f 0..1022=1023 cylinders, 0..254=255 heads, 1..63=63 sectors

Disk:

da0 at adw0 bus 0 target 0 lun 0
da0: <QUANTUM ATLAS_V__9_WLS 0230> Fixed Direct Access SCSI-3 device
da0: Serial Number 149033850994
da0: 40.000MB/s transfers (20.000MHz, offset 8, 16bit), Tagged Queueing Enabled
da0: 8755MB (17930694 512 byte sectors: 255H 63S/T 1116C)

Controller: (Iwill SIDE-2936UW)

adw0: <AdvanSys 3550 Ultra SCSI Adapter> port 0xd800-0xd83f mem 0xe6000000-0xe60000ff irq 10 at device 11.0 on pci0
adw0: SCSI ID 7, High & Low SE Term Enabled, Queue Depth 253

-- jay