Install floppy boot failure

["Christopher R. Hertel" <crh@nts.umn.edu>]

Dear Debian Development Debuggers,

(couldn't resist that)

I am attempting to install Debian 1.1 on my system.  I currently run
Linux
1.2.8 (an older SlackWare distribution), so I know that the system is
capable of running Linux.

I've written the boot, root, & base floppies as prescribed, but every
time
I try to boot I get error messages as follows:

boot: <cr>
Loading...........
Uncompressing Linux...

invalid compressed format (err=2)

 -- System Halted
 
I've tried using a different floppy, erasing (dd if=/dev/zero...) and
reformatting the floppies, formatting on different machines with
different
utilites (Norton format, DOS 6.x format, Weeners '95 format), and I've
tried re-downloading the boot image from a variety of sources.

All with the same result.

I also tried entering boot parameters to specify my SCSI & ethernet
cards.  This resulted in a different error message:

 incomplete literal tree

Well, where do I go from here?

Chris Hertel -)-----
.

-- 
Christopher R. Hertel -)-----                   University of Minnesota
crh@nts.umn.edu              Networking and Telecommunications Services