gunzip and Unexpected EOF

[Martin McCormick <martin@dc.cis.okstate.edu>]

before rebuilding a system after an upgrade that went terribly wrong,
I did the following in order to save kernel sources and configuration files:

tar cf - . |gzip >../otherfilesystem/root.tar.gz

	This worked fine on the home file system and I recovered all
the /home files but when I went to do 

tar zxf otherfilesystem/root.tar.gz, things seemed to start for a
while and then disaster!!!


gzip: stdin: unexpected end of file
tar: Read 4489 bytes from /mnt/root.tar.gz

	Apparently a special file or something in / makes gzip stop
before decompressing most of the 900 MB file.  Is there any way to
cause it to go any farther?  I am not trying to restore every byte of
the old file system, only selected parts such as /usr/local/src,
/usr/src and various crontab files.  Of course, the creation of the
archive left no hint that it was not going to unpack later.