>> (1) Create a big file.  [...]
>> (2) Compress this file.  I used gzip --fast [...]
>> (3) Uncompress the file to /dev/null.  Do you get an error?  I do.
> Yikes!  Indeed I do!

>  a: 2147483647         0     4.2BSD   2048 16384    27   # (Cyl.    0 - 131071*)

> [console]<@> # gzcat < biggest-file.gz > /dev/null
> 
> gzcat: stdin: invalid compressed data--length error
> [console]<@> # 

I find this _very_ disturbing.  Your partition is actually below the
1TB mark, albeit not by much, which means that most of my theories -
and I think the theory put forth about it being a sign-extension bug in
the FFS code - are now out the window.

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