[dnanian]

It seems that older Panther CDs don't have the Disk Utility that has the sparse-image-mount command. From what I could tell, that was introduced in 10.3.7. But, creating a BootCD (with BootCD) should bring your native command in, which will work.

Why the trouble? It's very hard for me to say. Netinfo can sometimes do this, and while we copy it properly, it must sometimes be in a 'bad state'. (In fact, we've even seen the netinfo command-line utilities fail on a volume that's working with netinfo.)

These steps are, sometimes, necessary. Painful, I know...