Hi,
With the help of great tips on this forum I was able to successfully boot Knoppix on my diskless laptop and do a "poor man" install on external USB hard disk. I boot from the Knoppix cd and then do pivot_root to fire up the debian on the usb disk. All worked fine for few months and then a few days back one of the package upgrade has created havoc - I am not sure what happenned but here is the problem :
- when i try to install any package or do apt-get dist-upgrade ( and any dpkg -i installyion ) I get the following error :

dpkg: serious warning: files list file for package `kppp' missing, assuming package has no files currently installed.
dpkg: error processing <package> : files list file for package `kpf' is missing final newline.
Processing was halted becasue there were too many errors

becasue of these errors I am unable to install, remove or upgrade any package - except apt-get update nothing works. I have browsed through several forums and used all techinques to reinstall kppp / kpf, delete them, force ignore them etc but nothing has worked. Before I am forced to reinstall debian afresh on my disk from scratch, I want to make this last attempt to find if any of you have faced this probelm and how could I possibly fix this ?