Problem with tar+gzip/gunzip

[Bill Wood]

I recently built a tarball by using the command line
    cd /tmp;tar -zcf home-dir.tgz /home/bill
and then writing /tmp/home-dir.tgz to CD.

When I later copied the file from CD to a working dir and attempted to
unpack it, I got the following result:

    gunzip -c home-dir.tgz | tar xf -
    tar: Skipping to next header
    tar: Archive contains obsolescent base-64 headers
    tar: Archive contains
        `\016\000\0001\004\001\002\236\016\000\000\001'
        where numeric off_t value expected
    tar: Archive contains `\'$\003\004$\036#\020' where numeric   
         mode_t value expected
    tar: Archive contains `\002\237\016\000\000;\n\020\001*\016'
         where numeric time_t value expected
    tar: Archive contains `!\000\000\000\213=%'
         where numeric major_t value expected
    tar: Archive contains `\001\000\0001\r\001\002\234'
         where numeric uid_t value expected
    tar: Archive contains `\016\000\000(\001\001\002\235'
         where numeric gid_t value expected
       : implausibly old time stamp 1969-12-31 17:59:59
    tar: Skipping to next header

    gunzip: home-dir.tgz: invalid compressed data--crc error

    gunzip: home-dir.tgz: invalid compressed data--length error
    tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors

The tar file isn't completely corrupted since the directory "bill" was
created and part of a subtree was built within it.

The two gunzip errors make me suspect numeric overflow.  The command
line

    gunzip -l home-dir.tgz

resulted in

    compressed  uncompr. ratio uncompressed_name
    439902443 1049169920  58.0% home-dir.tar

Was the tar file too large for gzip?  Is there any hope of recovery?

By the way, I had a slightly smaller tarball made a week earlier that
generated the same gunzip errors but no tar errors when I tried to
unpack it.  Is there any hope of recovering it?

The tar version is 1.14, the gunzip version is 1.2.4, I built the
tarballs under Mandrake 9.1 and tried to unpack them under Mandriva
10.1.

Thanks, and hoping against hope,

 -- Bill Wood