(I hope Steve doesn't mind if I put this back to the list.)

>> allowed me to proceed to attempt to load from ftp. But about half way
>> through the first tarball, kern-GENERIC.tgz, it choked, complaining
>> there is no space left on the device. (70 M on root should be enough,
>> right?)
>
> This is usually a sign the the filesystem (in memory or swap, I forget
> which) that _sysinst_ runs in, is running out of space.

First I'm thinking, how does an empty root file system become full 
before anything is copied to it? Then I reread that and I think I see 
something here. It's the memory file system that would be running low, 
and I could maybe see that.

I have 36MB RAM in the system.

> Something you might try (check the paths, it's been forever since I've
> done anything in sysinst) is after you've formatted the root 
> filesystem,
> mount it up on /mnt, mkdir /mnt/tmp, rmdir /tmp, and ln -s /mnt/tmp 
> /tmp.

Okay, I start the install kernel and drop out of sysinstall. Then, just 
out of superstition, I mounted /dev/sd0f, which I have scheduled for 
/tmp, on /mnt2, and copied the file in /tmp to it, unmounted /mnt2 and 
mounted /dev/sd0f on /tmp. That partition has 128M on it. So /tmp 
should have plenty of room.

Still goes into timeout cycles trying to copy INSTALL.more to /dev/sd0a 
mounted on /targetroot.

So I used swapctl -a /dev/sd0b (72 MB) to get swap going, and it still 
goes into timeout cycles trying to copy INSTALL.more to the root 
partition.

> (Or once the install fails, the partition should already be mounted, 
> and
> you can go from there.)  Then try the install.

Okay, just for grins, I'll try mounting the root partition at /mnt and 
linking a /mnt/tmp to /tmp and seeing if sysinstall will proceed from 
there.