I am attempting to create a LFS system to learn Linux. I downloaded the packages it asked for, burnt them on a cd and moved them over to the computer I am putting it on, which currently is running SuSE 8.2. I attempt to unzip the .tar.bz2 file with "tar -xjf autoconf-2.57.tar.bz2" and it returns with:
"bzip2: (stdin) is not a bzip2 file.
tar: Child returned status 2
tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors"

then I try without the bizip2 tag and it says:
"tar: This does not look like a tar archive
tar: Skipping to next header
tar: Archive contains obsolescent base-64 headers
tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors"

The same thing occurs with my .tar.gz files, except I use the gzip tag.

I know that they are zipped files, as they extract in windows. Any idea what the problem is?

well just run "file autoconf-2.57.tar.bz2" to see what the file really is... it's probably either half a file, or an incorrectly named gzip file.

It just says it's "data".

tar -xjvf <filename> is what I normally use, because it gives you a little more information during errors. There might be the possiblity that they were downloaded with problems.

so it clearly can't identify it as any known file type, so i'd shoot for a download error.

This is probably wrong, but if the permissions are set up as "root-only", you might have to chmod it to something usable.