I decided it was time to place a PXE boot install image on my network for installing Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid desktops. For the most part everything went as expected (see this post) but during the install I got an error that "restricted/binary-amd64/Packages was corrupt".
It turns out there are no restricted packages on the alternate installer image, and the lack of an empty "Packages" file at "/dists/lucid/restricted/binary-amd64" where the networked install image is located was causing it to bomb.
Simply doing
touch Packages
in that shared directory within the install image seems to have fixed the issue. For some reason the fact that the Packages.gz ungzips into a zero byte file was throwing it, but having an already existing zero byte file seemed to fix it.

thanks
Great tip, just what I was looking for!
Still an issue on Natty
Wow, you'd think this would have been resolved by now, apparently Canonical doesn't test PXE installs. This is still an issue on Natty (and I assume Maverick which I skipped on my PXE installs.)
So still need to touch dists/natty/restricted/binary-amd64/Packages (wherever it's located on your web share.)
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