frozen boot floppies -- can't read disks-1.44/driver-3.bin

[Eric Hanchrow <offby1@blarg.net>]

I copied the images from
ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/potato/main/disks-i386/current/disks-1.44,
and booted a VMware (http://www.vmware.com) virtual machine from
rescue.bin, formatted the hard disk, and asked to install from the
network.  The setup program asked me to install the drivers,
presumably so it could operate the network card.  It happily read
driver-1.bin and driver-2.bin, but as it was about done reading
driver-3.bin, it complained about an I/O error.  The Vmware machine
also complained "Short read (expected 18432 got 3072)".

Perhaps that particular file (disks-1.44/driver-3.bin) is bad?

How can I help further debug this?  If the problem is already known,
I'd be happy to test the next batch of floppies.