dpkg can't access deb packages in archives

[brownh@hartford-hwp.com (Haines Brown)]

I'm installing sarge on a hard disk with a cross install. The target
disk has been partitioned and has the reiserfs filesystem. The target
disk / directory is mounted on my running system from which is run
debootstrap.

debootstrap checks and validates a long list of packages that are
downloaded into the apt archives on the target disk. It then proceeds
to extract about half of those packages, and finally installs "core
packages."

I assume the core packages were installed, for I see a lot of files
where I would expect to find them. For example, /usr/bin/diff.

However, when it comes chroot running dpkg-reconfigure on
console-data, the package turns out not to be installed. Although
debootstrap checked and validated the package (and its two related
packages), it did not extract and install it.  

  :/# dpkg -l console-data
  No packages found matching console-data.    

chroot has no problem seeing the console-data package in the archive:

  :/# ls -l /var/cache/apt/archives/console-data*
  -rw-r--r--  1 root root 1122266 Jul 15 22:17 
      /var/cache/apt/archives/console-data_2002.12.04dbs-43_all.deb

but 

  :/# dpkg -i console-data
  dpkg: error processing console-data (--install):
        cannot access archive: No such file or directory
  Errors were encountered while processing:
        console-data

Apparently, dpkg can't access the archive. The archives directory
permissions are rwxr-xr-x.

Haines Brown