create index on a very large table problem

[ford]

I have a problem with creation of index on very large table. Has anybody had an experience with this?
I have created a large table (600M row) and need to create a multi-column index. I am having problem creating index. It seems like process get stuck after while. Data is being loaded very fast if I turn indexing off. If I create an index and then load data proceeds seems to get stuck after 80M row.
First 10M row get created in less than a minute and after that process never finishes (around 80M row) and CPU is being utilized at 100%. I haven't reached file size limit (MYI file is around 800Meg) and disk have lots of room.


I am using mysql 5.0
table is being created using default table space and contains 3 integer columns
index is being created by using "create index name on table (col1,col2,col3)"