How are you checking the burned CD? Rather than md5sum /dev/cdrom, try dd if=/dev/cdrom > md5sum to see if you get anything different. This has fixed problems for me in the past. On 10/3/05, greg wm <tclug at greatlakedata.com> wrote: > hi, > > i'm surprised and annoyed to find that my backup linux server fails to > compute a md5sum properly about every 3rd time i check a CD image. so i > guess that machine can't add, and i guess i don't really want it as my > backup server afterall! > > but waitaminute, how do i really know it's hardware? i can imagine a > software bug that is latent enough to only surface on occational > machines. how would you test such a bugger to see what's going on? > > and then good grief, my XP machine.. i burned from it, the CD is fine, > but cygwin sha1sum always fails the iso. somehow this one doesn't seem > so likely to be hardware, but how would i know? what tests would you run? > > in an earlier life, before many of you were born i'm sure, working on > data general clones my (then) company (kurzweil computer products) was > building, i discovered (guess how) that the hardware could be shown to > fail only when stressed with certain patterns passing via DMA while > simultaneously testing memory. i had to write the diagnostic to prove > it. i wasn't immediately popular with our hardware designers, but the > test became standard in QA. in the intervening 3 decades it seems i > have been blessed with working on hardware that just works. but now.. > my current life won't afford me the luxury of writing my own diagnostics. > > are there some good open source diagnostics that stress the machine > fully, like in particular stressing disc DMA while simultaneously > testing memory? > > tia, > greg > > Greg Whitley Mott > IT Coordinator > NonviolentPeaceforce.org > > _______________________________________________ > TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota > tclug-list at mn-linux.org > http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list > -- John T. Hoffoss