Problems installing 8.1 on an alphastation 250

Hello,

I'm running into a snag trying to install SuSE 8.1 on an
old AlphaStation 250 that had been running rh7.2. The system
boots off the CD fine; doing an FTP install seems to go
all right -- it downloads the image and starts YaST. I
answer the questions, and the "options" screen begins to
be filled in. At that point, a pop-up says something like
"downloading package information..." and then about 10 minutes
later, a red screen appears saying the installation failed.
Poking around the various consoles yields these clues:

<timestamp> linux(375)[mediaaccess]MediaWget.cc (getFile):125 wget error:file
not found

on a different console:

starting /mounts/intsys/sbin/inst_setup YaST
install program exitcode is 137
sync... ok

and on yet another:

linux modprobe: modprobe: Can't locate module for char-major-10-144
linux modprobe: modprobe: Can't locate module for char-major-9
linux modprobe: modprobe: Can't locate module for char-major-9
linux modprobe: modprobe: Can't locate module for char-major-10-144
linux modprobe: modprobe: Can't locate module for char-major-9
linux modprobe: modprobe: Can't locate module for char-major-9
linux modprobe: modprobe: Can't locate module for char-major-10-144
linux modprobe: modprobe: Can't locate module for char-major-6
linux modprobe: modprobe: Can't locate module for char-major-9
linux modprobe: modprobe: Can't locate module for char-major-9

Any suggestions on things I can try?

Thanks,
Joe