We see a truncated file produced, here on even a third machine. $ for i in $@*; do ls -og $i; zcat $i|cpio -t|wc -l; done -rw-r--r-- 1 103770 2010-04-07 11:01 /boot/initrd.img-2.6.32-3-686 1092 blocks 160 -rw-r--r-- 1 7244191 2010-03-22 09:11 /boot/initrd.img-2.6.32-3-686.bak 35062 blocks 646