I had downloaded the Redhat 6.0 and had a few problems. i was sing a 56k modem and you can imagine. After I thought I had everything I created the boot disk and installed from files on my computers Drive C ( 6 gig fat32 ). Everything would be going fine until I saw a message telling me cpio had a bad magic. I did not know what this was, but I went to the alt-f2 window and did --> cat install.log Only then did I realize there is not enough info there to tell me which RPM had a problem! I only saw kernel cpio bad magic .... I think it would be great if you gave the name of the package so I could download it again. I ended up doing the whole download again. Not fun on a 56 modem. it is much more fun using Redhat!
the install says what packages it's installing, in order. the error would be with whatever package is around the message (in your case, kernel).