Installation woes

[Stephen Henry <mithrandir_(_at_)_hurontario_(_dot_)_net>]

Installing the latest CD release on a 150 mhz x86 type machine. One 540
meg and one 6.2 gig drive. Partitioning:

wd0a 450 meg as /
wd0b ballance as /tmp

wd1d 200 meg mounted at /tmp
wd1e 2 gig mounted at /usr
wd1f 2 gig mounted at /var
wd1g ballance mounted at /home

After fooling around to get all this to work (had severa false starts with
overlapping partitions etc.) and getting a CD that could be recognized,
I got things to go pretty smoothly up to installing tar balls from the CD.
Each time through the 'base...' failed to extract properly and several
times the system froze (required power cycle to reboot) or rebooted
itself.

The machine is very simple. On motherboard IDE with two drives and CD, vga
video and NIC.  that's it.

If I can't get this to work soon I'm going back to BSDi or I'll use the
machine for NT and run Wildcat! Sheesh!

Can anyone offer any advice? What am I doing wrong? What am I missing?

Steve.