Unable to install on large hard drive

[Christopher Kelley]

Up until now, I've installed FreeBSD on smaller drives (< 15 gig), but I 
recently had to replace the HD in my windows machine, so I got a larger 
hard drive with the idea of installing fBSD on it as well and dual 
booting that machine.

The motherboard is an Asus A7V133, and the hard drive is a Maxtor 
4D040H2 40 gig HD.  The motherboard supports LBA, so I'm led to believe 
(though googling) that the HD size isn't a problem. fBSD correctly 
recognizes the HD when booting. I am attempting to install FreeBSD 
6.0-Release, I haven't tried any of the 5.x versions to see if the 
results are the same.

I have a small partition for the windows system that is 5 gig, a large 
partition for programs and data that is 18 gig, and around 15 gig left 
for fBSD.  The installer squawks about the drive geometry, and says it 
will use a more sane geometry.  I set up the slices and it doesn't 
squawk about writing them, and then attempts to install the system.  I 
immediately get an error "Write failure on transfer!" and it can't seem 
to write anything to the drive.

The good news is, it isn't harming my windows partitions.  I can easily 
boot back into windows and everything there works.

I did look through the manual and searched a bit on google, but I'm not 
having much luck finding even suggestions of what to try.  Does anyone 
have any suggestions?

Christopher