I have an Maxtor ESDI 600+ MB drive partitioned roughly:
/dev/hda1 100Mb msdos
/dev/hda2 190Mb ext2fs /
/dev/hda3  20Mb ext2fs swap (no file system made)
/dev/hda4 290Mb ext2fs /usr/local

My scheme is to use my Colorado Jumbo Tape to backup and restore c:\install
under DOS.  I then use the Hard Drive install option under doinstall.  This
works except that I get various Read Errors during the install.  I suspect
that the bad spots in an msdos partition are not handled correctly.  If I copy
the failed packages to another location on the c: drive, I stand a good chance
of being able to subsequently install them without an error.

Does anybody know if this is actually what is happening?  I am not anxious to
do too much configuring of the system until I get a handle on this problem and
the corresponding possibility of making a backup to the msdos partition and
hitting one of these spots.

Since I have plenty of disk space for now, would the mtools stuff give me
another way of working around this issue?

Charlie