The transfer reaction ^7 Be(d,n)^8 B is modelled for the recent low experimental energies using the DWBA. Tests of the validity of the ANC method for the extraction of the S_17 astrophysical factor are performed. We show that a peripheral assumption is no longer accurate for center of mass energies greater than approximately 15 MeV. In all cases we found that core deformation and/or excitation effects to be small as long as the optical potential for the entrance channel is not strongly surface

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... eaked. Multistep corrections to the DWBA were found to be small. We also emphasize that the lack of knowledge of the optical potentials for the entrance and outgoing channels induces severe uncertainties in the extracted S_17 astrophysical factor.