Installation Hang

[Nick P.]

I am a first-time user who is having a nightmare installing FreeBSD.  I've tried several different methods, but my installation hangs at various points during the installation.  Often during the extraction of bin (11% seems to be a popular time)  sometimes later in the bin extraction.  Sometimes during the ports, and sometimes during the docs.  I've tried from CD, booting from floppies and then using FTP (a variety of FTP servers), booting from floppies then using the CD.  All in all I've probably started the install about 20 times in the past two days.  

It seems to be a common problem based on what I've found by googling (look for "Extracting bin into /") :  but I haven't found an answer.  This is really frustrating because I see so many other people that had the problem, without finding an answer.  One person had the ftp install work after the cd install hung, but this is not the case for me.

And I left the installation running the first time, for like 8 hours; it wasn't a matter of not letting it do its thing.

During the install I can switch to other consoles, but after it hangs it doesn't seem to let me.

I'm at my wits end and if I could figure out how to simply remove the boot loader I wouldn't be far from giving up and moving on to another OS.

Specs:
PIII 733 Mhz
384 MB Ram
120 GB HD, w/ a windows partition already on it

Also, when I begin a CD install, after it hangs, it strangely won't boot to the cd-rom anymore.  After I boot to the FreeBSD floppies, and that install fails, I can then boot from the cd-rom again.

Please advise.

-Nick


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