If you can put together a quick patch to rethrow the error I'll install it in the next few days. I'll be working on OpenACS issues over the weekend but it's going to be administrative stuff, not code, it appears.
There's an acs bootstrap installer module in the openacs-4 package in the SDM (https://openacs.org/sdm) so feel free to submit a patch there.
If you don't have time I'll try to get to it myself but it will be awhile.
The error from your server.log file would help a lot - post it here when you've got a moment (again, you need VERBOSE=ON when you install to get it).
