Bug#920284: debian-installer: Installing Debain 9.6 on amd64 KVM via netinst fails in "select and install software"

[Zachary Palmer <zep_debian_packages@bahj.com>]

Package: debian-installer
Severity: important
Tags: d-i

Dear Maintainer,

I am installing Debian 9.6 using a netinst image on an amd64 virtual machine
(kvm).  Everything runs as expected until the "Select and Install Software"
step, which fails with the generic message "Installation step failed".  
Terminal
4 shows some interesting output:

    Failed to fetch 
http://security-cdn.debian.org/debian-security/pool/updates/main/o/openssl/libssl1.1_1.1.0j-1~deb9u1_amd64.deb 
Writing more data than expected (1235886 > 1231594)


    Hashes of expected file:


     - 
SHA256:dddf4ff686845b82c6c778a70f1f607d0bb9f8aa43f2fb7983db4ff1a55f5fae


     - SHA1:5d754764288ae1751d7a05d11c801cde71456602 [weak]


     - MD5Sum:5e3b6c66100964833307d3a943918275  [weak]

    E
    :
    Unable to fetch some archives, maybe run apt-get update or try with 
--fix-issing?

I don't think that this is the only file it failed to fetch, as I see 
the tail
of a similar message further up in the terminal.  (I wasn't able to 
scroll to
see it.)

Repeating the installation step produces the same error. Interestingly, a
workaround described in bug 820074
(https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=820074;msg=14) works 
here.
On terminal 2, I run

    chroot target
    bash
    apt-get install systemd

Warnings about /dev/pts are printed, but the package installs 
correctly.  I then
log out of the console, return to the installer menu, and re-perform the 
"Select
and Install Software" step.  This time, it works just fine and I reach 
the end
of installation without further interruption.

The content of Bug 820074 was posted in April 2016 when Stretch was in 
testing.
I am currently using a stable installer for Stretch and the bug seems to 
still
exist.  The commands I used to launch KVM were:

    qemu-img create -f qcow2 hda.img 32g
    kvm -m 1024 -hda hda.img -cdrom 
~/download/debian-9.6.0-amd64-netinst.iso

I got similar behavior from a 9.4.0 installer as well.

Thank you!

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-- System Information:
Debian Release: 9.6
  APT prefers stable
  APT policy: (500, 'stable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 4.9.0-8-amd64 (SMP w/8 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.utf8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.utf8 (charmap=UTF-8), 
LANGUAGE=en_US.utf8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)