From owner-freebsd-questions  Fri Sep 13 11:38:22 1996
Return-Path: owner-questions
Received: (from root@localhost)
          by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) id LAA07281
          for questions-outgoing; Fri, 13 Sep 1996 11:38:22 -0700 (PDT)
Received: from granite.sentex.net (granite.sentex.ca [199.212.134.1])
          by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) with ESMTP id LAA07274
          for <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org>; Fri, 13 Sep 1996 11:38:20 -0700 (PDT)
Received: from s3i.UUCP (Us3i@localhost) by granite.sentex.net (8.7.5/8.6.9) with UUCP id OAA05386 for freebsd-questions@freebsd.org; Fri, 13 Sep 1996 14:30:29 -0400 (EDT)
X-Authentication-Warning: granite.sentex.net: Us3i set sender to s3i!s3ihq!myoung using -f
Received: by scaleable.com; Fri, 13 Sep 96 13:58:08 
Message-ID: <0B0FFE1F81NNNOIP@scaleable.com>
Date:  Fri, 13 Sep 96 13:58:08 
From: MYoung@scaleable.com
To: bsd@s3ihq
Subject: install comment
X-Mailer: UGate [Ver. 2.02]
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Sender: owner-questions@FreeBSD.ORG
X-Loop: FreeBSD.org
Precedence: bulk


I downloaded the FreeBSD bin files and tried to install them from a DOS 
partition on a generic 486 machine. Part of the way through the install,
I got the error message
    Write failure on transfer! (wrote -1 bytes of 1024 bytes)
    Unable to transfer distribution for wd0s1

It took me quite a while to realize that one of the bin files that I downloaded
was too small.  It would have been much easier if the error message was better.
At first I thought that something was wrong with my hard disk since a write 
failure was reported and not some kind of read problem.