Comment 6 for bug 1364642

Ah, I think the "hardware error" is a false positive here. dpkg needs to check existing symlinks on unpack in order to actually respect them - - i. .e the admin might have moved a directory to a different place and put a symlink instead, and dpkg respects/maintains that. Thus a package can never replace a symlink with a directory (i. . e. that needs an explicit symlink removal in its preinst).

I'm not sure why it does the size check, or whether that's coming from some lower level.