Hi, For some days now, I've been trying to complete a successful installation of Sid into a VMware box, with the 20040209 version of the debian installer boot floppies. However, every install I try eventually bombs out at the "installing base system" stage, with an error "The debootstrap program exited with an error (return value 1)". Checking out /var/log/messages shows as last line: tar: Unrecognised file type Then I ran debootstrap from the Alt-F2 shell, as follows: debootstrap --arch i386 sid /target which first checks and validates all debs OK, but then fails while unpacking: ... I: Extracting libblkid1... I: Extracting e2fsprogs... tar: Unrecognised file type When I unpack the said e2fsprogs_1.34+1.35-WIP-2004.01.31-2_i386.deb file, it turns out that the contained data.tar.gz file contains a hard link, which doesn't seem to be supported by busybox's tar: # ar -x /target/var/cache/apt/archives/e2fsprogs_1.34\+1.35-WIP-2004.01.31-2_i386.deb # tar -xvzf data.tar.gz . ./sbin ./mke2fs ./mkfs.ext2 tar: Unrecognised file type Note that this is BusyBox v1.00-pre5 (Debian 20040101-6). After some searching around, I found this commit: http://www.busybox.net/cgi-bin/cvsweb/busybox/archival/libunarchive/get_header_tar.c#rev1.31 and this busybox-cvs-udeb bug report: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=233627 So it seems there have been some problems before with different tar formats, and I guess they are caused by some "too old" or "too new" format tar files being released lately? I hope either the tar files or busybox can be fixed. The former seems quite unlikely, but the latter shouldn't be too hard. I know I did complete a few debian-installer installations successfully before, some weeks ago, so this must have been a quite recent thing. Now that I'm writing this, some messages "tar: removing leading / from paths" also come to my mind... Please accept my apologies if this has been covered before, but Google and the mail archive search turned up nothing for the obvious keywords. So from now on, they hopefully will. ;) Cheers, Dimitry
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