HP/Compaq NX6110 Install

[mynameisjohn]

Hi learned members of the BSD community at large,

I have a relatively old Compaq NX6110 which I'm having trouble installing BSD onto, despite reading in a few places on the web that this laptop should work with a bit of nudging here and there.

From the NetBSD 5.1 installation disk it makes no difference which option I select at the boot menu (i.e. acpi, smp etc.), and always hangs at

wd0: (hard drive info goes here)

I notice a few lines of the dmesg higher up report uhci errors, such as

uhci1: host controller process error
uhci1: host controller halted

Out of curiosity I had a go with an OpenBSD disk, which also gets as far as

uhci1: host controller process error
uhci1: host controller halted
uhci_freex: xfer=0xd1deb100 not busy, 0x4f4e5155

I can boot OpenBSD by disabling the uhci module but then there's no NIC.

So any ideas on how I can get past this hanging issue using NetBSD? I'm relatively new to BSD, coming from Linux and Solaris.

TIA

John_