[9fans] Plan 9 doesn't boot on a (fairly new) computer

[Jorden Mauro <jrm8005@gmail.com>]

Here's the hardware:

AMD Athlon II X2 245 (64-bit dual core)
Gigabyte GA-MA785GM-US2H motherboard
One 1.5Tb SATA hard drive, old IDE cdrom

The Plan 9 and 9atom liveCDs have the same problem: when the `root is
from' prompt appears,
nothing happens and the keyboard does not work. The keyboard is not
usb and no usb devices
are plugged in. Both liveCDs apparently have nomp set, as only one cpu
is detected.

I had to change the `boot from' option on the vanilla Plan 9 CD,
because my motherboard/BIOS
does not let me have IDE drives as secondary master. 9atom seemed to
handle this better, but
both get stuck at the `root is from' prompt. Someone suggested Plan9
may not like the southbridge
on this motherboard (an AMD SB710).

Any ideas?

Thanks,
Jorden