boot floppy problems - invalid compressed format

[gaarder@actech.com (Steve Gaarder)]

I'm having a lot of trouble getting Debian on a 486 box.  It's a
pretty generic machine, with an  IDE hard drive & cdrom, AMD 486 CPU
on a motherboard with the Opti chipset.  Special kernel 0 doesn't get
anywhere at all.  THe standard kernel gets to this point:

Loading.....
Uncompressing Linux....

invalid compressed format (err=1)

-- System Halted

I'm stuck.  Any ideas?

thanks,

Steven Gaarder                              Network and Systems Administrator
gaarder@actech.com                          A C Technology, Ithaca, N.Y., USA