Hello, I was trying to test the boot process of Debian 1.1.8, which kept failing in the stage of unpacking the bases diskettes.
The system is: 80486 DX2/66 16Mb memory AHA1542CF ISA scsi controller PCI motherboard Disks: IDE - Western Digital 600Mb SCSI - a very old, very slow HP SCSI-1 disk some other devices are connected, but they are not relevant (info will be provided on demand, of course). I was testting the installation on the SCSI disk. What I experienced was that I was constantly getting a message saying: gzip: stdin: invalid compressed data -- format violated Error in archive format. When at the stage of unpacking the floppies (i.e. after they were copied to the hard disk). I md5sum'ed and compared the diskettes against the files which were copied to them, they compared fine. Under multi-user (I allready have Debian 1.1.x running), I ran floppy_merge from the "boot-floppies" package. It read the diskettes without complaining (as it does during installation), and created a file which passed "gzip -tv" and "star" fine. Then I tried to boot from the boot diskettes and install the base diskettes on the IDE drive. This WORKED. So I suspected that maybe the kernel in the boot disk can't handle the SCSI disk well (I never got any errors from the SCSI), so still with dinstall running on the first vc, I switched to vc2 and manually ran floppy_merge, gzip and star on the troublesome SCSI disk. This WORKED TOO. The only explenation I can think of (which isn't very robust, I admit) is that maybe star finds the pipe from gzip to be empty sometimes, and quits instead of waiting for gzip to fill the pipe. This might also explain the fact that the point of complaint wasn't exactly the same all the time. Thanks for any input about this. Cheers, --Amos Shapira [EMAIL PROTECTED]
