woody boot floppies woes

[sharkey@superk.physics.sunysb.edu]

Uhm, has *anyone* succeeded to install a machine using the woody boot
floppies?  So far, I've just met with utter failure.

Every time I try to install the base system over the network the
machine prints "trying to get package" messages for a whole bunch of
packages, and then returns me to the menu with "Install the Base System"
still as the Next item.

Virtual terminal 3 contains the message:

command /usr/sbin/debootstrap woody /target http://http.us.debian.org:80/debian returned 256

I can't seem to avoid this.  Anyone see anything like this before?

The downloading seems to succeed.  At least, /target/var/cache/apt/archives
is full of packages, but it just won't ever unpack/install them.

I'm going to completely wipe the machine now and try again.

Eric