broken pipe from tar

[Gregory Nowak]

Hi All.

On a couple of occasions while using tar with the y flag to pipe its output through bzip2 when creating an archive, I've had tar quit with a broken pipe message.

Does anyone have any ideas on what could be causing this. I think I read somewhere that broken pipes could indicate a power supply failure, but am not sure if I remember that correctly.
Could this in fact indicate a hardware failure, and if so, which piece?

Thanks for any thoughts in advance.

Greg