help installing potato from hard disk

[Lee Malatesta <brokeninside@freewwweb.com>]

I'm trying to install potato on a computer with no cdrom 
and a slow net connection (56k modem and an free ISP that 
cuts off after 6 hours of connection time).  I tried to 
install via downloading the entire 
/dists/frozen/main/binary-i386 tree.  This didn't work 
and gave me errors, so I also downloaded the 
/dists/frozen/main/source/Sources.gz file and 
/dist/frozen/main/source/base tree.  With those install
still chokes with a fairly cryptic message about a
problem with the Merge List in
/var/state/apt/lists/_mnt_hdc1_dists_frozen_main_binary-i386_Packages

Does anyone have any ideas on what I've missed downloading?

Does anyone have a any other ideas for getting
potato on this machine?  I don't think an ftp install
is such a good idea, because like I said, my ISP cuts
the connection every six hours and it will likely take
much longer than that to do a full install of every
thing I want.

I'd greatly appreciate some help.

Thanks,

-lee