I am a relative newbie to bsd having installed it on another computer years ago-but not much more than that. My hardware is: GA-K8NS Gigabyte motherboard, sempron 2600, 512MB ram, 4 ATA hard drives ( 2 additional channels off of Promise controller ) 1 maxtor sata hard drive. I checked & burned freebsd 6.1 The install disk boots but doesn't seem to mount the sata drive or the two from the Promise controller-works fine with linux. The installer lists five drives + the optical drive ad0, ad1, ad4, ad8 & ad9 but ad4,8, & 9 are either just odd duplicates of the 1st two drives or something else ( the drive sizes listed for those last three drives don't come close to anything on my system)
Anyway I find I can't use the <Alt> key plus the F# keys to open a virtual console. I know it's not <Alt> plus <Ctrl> like in linux because I read that much of the install read me. I can use <Alt> F2 to get the boot log and use scroll lock and page up/down to move within that, but no commandline is available and if I try any other F# keys I just get beeped at. Any ideas how to get virtual console working?

Use the Fixit menu and start the Shell.

The emergency shell is started late in the install process and you likely haven't gotten that far yet. I am interested in knowing what you hope to do from the shell though... it's not very helpful early in the install unless you know exactly what you're doing.

I was hoping to do 'df' and see how freebsd was identifing my disks.
Maybe I'm out of luck on that though. Strange, to me, that 6.1 has such a problem with my ordinary hardware.