FreeBSD 7.0 installation problems.Please help!

[Steve Franks]

> "Write failure on transfer!
> (wrote -1 bytes of 1425408 bytes)"
> "Unable to transfer the GENERIC distribution from acd0"

I'm a bit of a n00b too.  There's a whole host of things that have
given me that issue - bad cd drive, scratched disk, etc.

More importantly, I've seen sysinstall never actually format the disk,
so then it can't write to it.  The way I fixed it is by hitting "w"
(write) before "q" (quit) in both the fdisk and partition pages of
sysinstall.  I've seen this behavior on both 6.2 and 7.0, and I've
never paid enough attention to repeat it or figure out what I did
wrong - I just use the write command manually and things seem happier.
 Make sure you see a box pop up on the partition/label page when you
hit write that mentions something about "doing newfs ....", otherwise
just start over.  I think that's the magic step.

Hope this helps,
Steve