sarge installation fails to populate directories

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

For a month I"ve been trying to do a hard-disk (cross) installation of
sarge from a running system that also runs sarge. The target
partition is 500 Mb on a SCSI disk. 

1. The partitioning with cfdisk went smoothly. The target partition,
   sdc1, was made primary and bootable. Other partitions were
   created. 

2. Initialized the partitions with mkreiserfs. This also went
   smoothly. Initialized the swap partition.

3. Mounted /dev/sdc1 and did: 
   cdebootstrap sarge /mnt/debinst http://http.us.debian.org/debian, 
   and while there's a history here, my current run finished normally. 

The problem is that /usr and /var directories are empty. I struggled
with this with debootstrap for a while, although usually the /var
partition was filled, but never /usr until advised to use
cdebootstrap. That went well and partitions were filled, but for a
reason irrelevant here, I started again from the beginning, and now
cdebootstrap wouldn't fill /var and /usr. All the base packages were
downloaded and unpacked, but for some reason one or more directories
not seen.  

Adding the --arch i386 option did not help. I checked permissions and
ownership of the directories.  I'm currently slowly moving ahead by
doing everything piecemmeal, starting with copying over the dpkg and
working with it.

What are the possible causes of this inability to access one or more
directories during the installation of base packages? I've tried a
dozen times from the beginning, and one or more directories always
ended being empty except that one time; which apparently was an
accident.  

Haines Brown