I have set up a cobbler pxe boot server and managed to get centos5.8 to fully automatically install. Unfortunately with Ubuntu 12.04-server-i386, it stops mid-way through with a message stating that packages are corrupt. I tried following this tip to unzip the Packages.gz file which results in an empty Packages file with nothing in it. Other people suggested doing a touch command which essentially does the exact same thing, an empty Packages file. That results in me getting a different message that states:

Couldn't retrieve dists/precise/restricted/binary-i386/Packages. This may be due to a network.....

Does anyone know how to work around this issue? Hitting continue before having made the tip/workaround resulted in ubuntu installing fine, but I need to be able to provide no manual input.

Any advice appreciated, Stu