Write Failure On Transfer!

[Ed Garza]

Need help. I am receiving the error message listed
below when trying to do a fresh install of FreeBSD 5.4
on an ECS K7S5A motherboard with AMD Athlon XP 2000,
512MB, 8GB hdd. BIOS on motherboard is the latest BIOS
available.

Message:
"Write failure on transfer! (wrote -1 of 1425408
bytes)"

This message appears during the transfer of the base
distribution. I get 
it if I try to install from CDROM and FTP.

I have done the following:
tried installing from several CDROM's
tried installing from several FTP sites
tried installing on different harddrives
disabled PNP aware OS in bios
ensured that disk geometry is correct
tried using default slice's
tried using custom slice's

When I press the following key combos, I can see the
following information:

ALT-F4
#

ALT-F2
/stand/cpio: invalid header: checksum error
/stand/cpio: warning: skipped 21504 bytes of junk
/stand/cpio: No such file or directory
/stand/cpio: invalid header: checksum error
/stand/cpio: warning: skipped 18432 bytes of junk
/stand/cpio: No such file or directory
/stand/cpio: invalid header: checksum error
/stand/cpio: warning: skipped 190976 bytes of junk
/stand/cpio: No such file or directory
/stand/cpio: invalid header: checksum error
/stand/cpio: warning: skipped 25600 bytes of junk
/stand/cpio: No such file or directory
/stand/cpio: invalid header: checksum error
/stand/cpio: warning: skipped 26624 bytes of junk
/stand/cpio: No such file or directory
/stand/cpio: invalid header: checksum error
/stand/gunzip: : invalid distances set
/stand/cpio: warning: skipped 47104 bytes of junk
/stand/cpio: No such file or directory
/stand/cpio: invalid header: checksum error
/stand/cpio: warning: skipped 36352 bytes of junk
/stand/cpio: No such file or directory
/stand/cpio: invalid header: checksum error
/stand/cpio: premature end of file

Another thing i tried was writing the slice info to
the harddrive by typing "w" in the sysinstall screen,
but that reports the following error:
"unable to find device node for /dev/ads01b in dev!
The creation of
the file system will be aborted"

Do not know if these problems are related or not.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.