I made the floppies from the directory, booted, and started a clean install 
using the default partitioning and just the non-X sets, getting them with 
FTP. This is on a Pentium system with a 13 Gig hard drive. Towards the end 
of the tar for base.tgz, it starts kicking out errors of not being able to 
set the date and permissions on folders it is creating because / is full. 
The directories it is complaining about are created, and they seem to have 
perfectly reasonable times on them, but after the base.tgz untarring, it 
says errors were encountered.

Even if I tell it to continue, the installer won't let me go beyond the 
unpacking.

I went out to the shell and tried to do the tar by hand, and got the same 
results. / is pretty full (like 98%). Here's the weird thing: I deleted 
/sysinst and df *still* says that / is about 98% full, and the tar still 
gets the same results.

Maybe the size of / needs to be made much larger. I don't know if this is 
related to the size of my hard drive, but it definitely prevented the 
installation from going forwards.