Sysintall problem

[Andy Hanson]

I have a Abit BP6 motherboard that I have been running on freebsd 4.X for years 
now.  But the hard drive has been getting close to failure, and I wanted to do a 
clean install of freebsd 5.2.

So I picked up a 80G WD800JB drive and preceded to install Freebsd 5.2.

Unfortunately, I've never been able to boot off a CDROM on this machine, so I 
started the installation off of the 5.2 floppies.

First off, the sysinstall program complains about the disk geometry, but its 
"fixed" geometry numbers don't seem too far off in drive size, so I let it 
slide.  I've never seen this warning before on a freebsd install, but I've seen 
reference to it in the archives, with these sorts of drives.

At any rate I create the slices.
2048M swap
2048M /
2048M /tmp
4096M /var
~66G /usr

Then I start up the standard install.

I apologize as I'm doing this from memory, while at work...
It seems to hang on a a screen with the command something like
newfs -O2 ads1f

at any rate I figure its formatting the drive, and maybe it will take a while. 
But the next morning it is still on the same screen? 12+ hours later.  Even my 
biggest partition being about 66G, it shouldn't take that long to format.

Something is clearly wrong, but after trying several times, I'm out of ideas.

Machine:
Abit Bp6 (2x466 celeron)
256M memory
WD800JB 80G drive