Unable to install on large hard drive

[Steve Bertrand]

> 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.
> 

This may be the wrong approach, but what exactly are you feeding to the
installer in regards to space per filesystem?

ie:

- 250m (for /)
- xxxm (for swap)
- xm (for /usr)
- etc etc

I've ignored those errors in the past, and have had no difficulty. This
has occurred since the 4.x days for me. Mind you, I never have (and god
willing) never will run a Windows system alongside FBSD, but perhaps
trying to feed it what you want for the most of the filesystems, and
when you get to the last, just accept the default block amount that FBSD
provides you with, and let it use the rest.

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

I'd suggest backing up your data on the Windows partition(s) if you have
anything crutially important (especially if you are not familiar with
recovering data), before you keep hammering at it.

Steve