Failed to install man pages, then debootstrap fails, and the house falls in

["Allen Williams" <anw@csunv.com>]

In the Install base system stage, (sorry- etch, i380 on 3.5 GHz pentium)
it start installing a bunch of libraries, etc. fine, then hits
this message (it found some additional dependencies, etc.):

Debootstrap warning
Warning: couldn't download manpages

Then, it can't download any package after that.  Finally, at the end, I get:

Warning: Failure to run chroot /target mount -t proc proc /proc

Debootstrap exited with an error
check syslog...etc, etc.

I found the Failure to run... message in the archives, but evidently, the
person
wasn't having all the previous problems I was.  I tried to do what
was recommended to him (dir /target/lib/ld-*, then try to execute
the /target/lib/ld-*, which I did and it worked to the extent I got
an error message for a bad command line (not knowing the syntax of
the command).

There's something in the log printed *vertically* that says it couldn't
get debconf version information, is it installed?

Then there's a message debconf: apt-extracttemplates failed illegal seek

also, there's an error: dpkg: unknow user 'root' in statoverride file

and dpkg fails.

Any ideas?

TIA

Thanks & Regards,
----------------
Allen Williams
(321)258-1272
anw@csunv.com