Loading packages from zip drive

[Chris Reay <Chris.Reay@Pareto-Partners.com.au>]

I have an old-ish Toshiba laptop (486, 200 mb, no CD) onto which I have
loaded the Debian v2.0 base system from the dos partition. I now want to add
a few console editing, development (mostly Python and C), and utility
packages; to this end I've copied the relevant binary-i package directories
(and packages) from an Infomagic CDR (11/98 ish) as well as the files
Package and Package.gz onto an Iomega zip drive, which I have mounted. I run
through dselect and select the zip directory, select the packages I want,
resolve (i trust) dependency issues and set it going. The process appears to
be collecting information about the packages but doesn't get very far at
all, and after a while finds "too many errors ..." and returns to the
dselect menu without installing the packages. I've looked through the
installation, faq, and tutorial documents, but haven't found anything
helpful on the topic. Does anybody know the solution?

Thanks

Chris Reay