trouble installing debian (any version)

["Brian Morgan" <bmorgan@greenville.edu>]

I'm having trouble installing debian on my p75 generic brand laptop (trying
slink and potato).  I have gone through setup, installed drivers and base
system, but it gives an error:

"There was a problem extracting the Base System from /target/base2_1.tgz" at
the end of installation.  When I reboot, it seems to freeze on LILO.

Is there something I'm doing wrong?  Could it be a bad disk in the mix of
things?  It doesn't seem to report any bad disks, but who knows?

Thanks,

Brian Morgan
bmorgan@greenville.edu