bug ins installation disks utilities?

[Amos Shapira <amos@dsi.co.il>]

Hello,

I was trying to test the boot process of Debian 1.1.8, which kept
failing in the stage of unpacking the bases diskettes.

The system is:

80486 DX2/66
16Mb memory
AHA1542CF ISA scsi controller
PCI motherboard

Disks:
IDE - Western Digital 600Mb
SCSI - a very old, very slow HP SCSI-1 disk

some other devices are connected, but they are not relevant (info
will be provided on demand, of course).  I was testting the
installation on the SCSI disk.

What I experienced was that I was constantly getting a message
saying:

gzip: stdin: invalid compressed data -- format violated
Error in archive format.

When at the stage of unpacking the floppies (i.e. after they were
copied to the hard disk).

I md5sum'ed and compared the diskettes against the files which
were copied to them, they compared fine.

Under multi-user (I allready have Debian 1.1.x running), I ran
floppy_merge from the "boot-floppies" package.  It read the
diskettes without complaining (as it does during installation), and
created a file which passed "gzip -tv" and "star" fine.

Then I tried to boot from the boot diskettes and install the
base diskettes on the IDE drive.  This WORKED.

So I suspected that maybe the kernel in the boot disk can't handle
the SCSI disk well (I never got any errors from the SCSI), so still
with dinstall running on the first vc, I switched to vc2 and manually
ran floppy_merge, gzip and star on the troublesome SCSI disk.  This
WORKED TOO.

The only explenation I can think of (which isn't very robust, I
admit) is that maybe star finds the pipe from gzip to be empty
sometimes, and quits instead of waiting for gzip to fill the pipe.
This might also explain the fact that the point of complaint wasn't
exactly the same all the time.

Thanks for any input about this.

Cheers,

--Amos Shapira
amos@dsi.co.il