Okay, I see what you are going for now, but I still can't get it to work. I do not have rpm2cpio, but I downloaded two versions (neither of which worked). I got the same messages with both, and even tried a different way to create the rpm.cpio file: # ./01-rpm2cpio rpm-3.0.6-554*.rpm | cpio --extract Error: header not recognized cpio: premature end of archive # ./01-rpm2cpio rpm-3.0.6-554*.rpm > rpm.cpio Error: header not recognized I attached the rpm2cpio file I used, which was recommended by the following site for SuSE 8.1: http://www.uwsg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0210.2/0093.html Thanks for your continued help.