karmic RC1 installer crash too many levels of symbolic links

[Glen Ditchfield]

Binary package hint: ubiquity

I booted from a USB stick created with usb-creator on a Hardy Heron computer from an
karmic-desktop-i386.iso with md5sum eb1cd70846f853aa0c4072b0ce1eb392. 'Test memory' reports no errors.

I installed onto a Hardy Heron computer without changing the existing partitioning; I left it at
- NTFS, unmounted
- swap
- ext3, not formatted, mounted as "/"
- ext3, not formatted, mounted as "/home"

The "Installing system" dialog progress bar made it to "Copying files... 54%", and then the installer crashed.

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/ubiquity/bin/ubiquity", line 457, in <module>
    main(oem_config)
  File "/usr/lib/ubiquity/bin/ubiquity", line 444, in main
    install(query=options.query)
  File "/usr/lib/ubiquity/bin/ubiquity", line 245, in install
    ret = wizard.run()
  File "/usr/lib/ubiquity/ubiquity/frontend/kde_ui.py", line 440
    self.progress_loop()
  File "/usr/lib/ubiquity/ubiquity/frontend/kde_ui.py", line 865, in progress_loop
    (ret, realtb))
RuntimeError: Install failed with exit code 1
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/share/ubiquity/install.py", line 2378, in <module>
    install.run()
  File "/usr/share/ubiquity/install.py", line 366, in run
    self.copy_all()
  File "/usr/share/ubiquity/install.py", line 768, in copy_all
    self.copy_file(sourcepath, targetpath, md5_check)
  File "/usr/share/ubiquity/install.py", line 496, in copy_file
    targetfh = open(targetpath, 'wb')
IOError: [Errno 40] Too many levels of symbolic links: '/target/usr/sbin/cupsaccept'

At this point all virtual terminals are displaying snow, so I don't know how to find syslog or partman. (Perhaps the author of
the "ubiquity (Ubuntu) guidelines" on the bug report page could add some hints?)