error installing 5.3-stable - WRITE_DMA

[craig]

hi,

this weekend i decided to upgrade from a working installation of fbsd 4.10
to 5.3
instead of doing a binary or source upgrade, i decided instead to do a
complete reinstall.

after backing up my data and relevant config files, i booted onto the 5.3
disk1 and began the install.
all went well until it got to actually writing the data to the disk (ie.
extracting base into \ directory)
it gets to between 15% and 18% and then just hangs. 
looking on the other terminal i see the same error message just scrolling up

ad0: WRITE_DMA UDMA ICRC error  ..... blah

this will carry on for a *long* time until it gives up trying.


this never happended with 4.10 so i am quite puzzled. 

i googled for similar things and found some suggestions that the HDD might
be going, so i used a low-level disk checker from hitachi (drive is hitachi
80GB) but it came out blank - the disk is fine. (its also quite new - no
more than 6 months)
in the BIOS i tried various combinations of disabling UDMA and 32-bit access
and such things but with no luck.

i have an P4 2.6GHz, 1GB RAM on an ASRock PE-Pro HT motherboard with onboard
ata IDE controller.

any suggestions would be very gratefully accepted.

also, if you need more info on the machine, please let me know.

much thanks for your help

---
craig at small-pla.net