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Date: Mon, 22 Jan 96 21:04:44 EST
From: jeff@stat.uconn.edu (Jeffrey M. Metcalf)
Message-Id: <9601230204.AA27027@ruddles.stat.uconn.edu>
To: questions@FreeBSD.org
Subject: FreeBSD Installation Problems
Sender: owner-questions@FreeBSD.org
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Hi,

I have attempted to install FreeBSD a number of times and have have failed 
at the same step each time.  For the life of me, I cannot figure it out.

I have properly? defragged my hard drive and FIPS has successfully created
a second 'fat' drive of a size of my choosing.  My CDROM is a Matshita CR-581
drive and is hence unsupported by the installation procedure.  I then copied
the entire contents of e:\dists\bin and e:\floppies to the respective
directories c:\FREEBSD\BIN and c:\FREEBSD\FLOPPIES on my sole remaining
DOS partition to prepare for the minimal installation.

The rest of the steps in the novice installation procedure seem to proceed
normally until I start writing the installation process.  The beginning of
the writing procedure continues normally until I reach the point where it
says 

"Extracting bin into / directory"

The message I got was 

"Write failure on transfer 
(wrote -1 bytes of 10240 bytes)"

Then is says 

"Unable to transfer bin distribution from wd0s1", the location of my c:\ dos 
partition.

Each time the installation has failed without writing anything.  EXCEPT for 
once when the installation software indicated that it wrote at least 7% of 
bin into / directory.  It then showed the message,

"Write failure on transfer", again.

I cannot understand what could be wrong here.  I am installing FreeBSD on a 
Packard Bell machine with a Pentium-100MHz processor.  It includes PCI Local 
Bus Video and a PCI Local Bus IDE Hard Drive Interface.   It is running 
Windows 95, and I believe a DOS instalation 6.0 or greater.  I admit
that before running FIPS, I was unable to remove any Windows Swapfile (if it 
exists on Windows 95) since the help menu advised me not to tamper with the 
virtual memory.  But I believe that FIPS would have failed to create the 
partition if this were a problem.  Am I correct?

Is this a Hardware configuration problem?

Please Help!

Thank You

Jeffrey M. Metcalf