Apt: local URIS must not start with //

[fairfax@pclink.com]

I have the Debian slink CD's, and I have a mirror of non-free on a local partition.  However, I cannot get Apt to recognize the non-free mirror.  Whatever line I put in sources.list, when I run apt-get update, it gives me the error message "local URIS must not start with //"  I've tried using 
	deb file:/<path> ...
as well as
	deb file:<path> ...
but neither of these does anything good. 

Assuming that Packages.gz maybe was causing a problem, I ran dpkg-scanpackages, but this didn't help either.

I tried moving Packages.gz to /Debian after that, but this also didn't help.

Here is the latest message from apt-get updates:

Err file:Debian/ stable/non-free Packages
  Invalid URI, local URIS must not start with //
Ign file:Debian/ stable/non-free Release
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
W: Couldn't stat source package list 'file:Debian/ stable/non-free Packages' (/var/state/apt/lists/Debian_dists_stable_non-free_binary-i386_Packages) - stat (2
No such file or directory)
W: You may want to run apt-get update to correct these missing files

Can anyone point out the error of my ways?

Steve Martin