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
>
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>


--
John T. Hoffoss