[lug] proper way to MD5SUM a cdrom?

[Sean Reifschneider]

On Sat, Jun 12, 2004 at 06:39:41PM +0000, D. Stimits wrote:
>Just a question on verifying CD-R's. I have the ISO, and have run md5sum 
>on it, it looks good. Then I burn it with cdrecord. How do I verify the 

Doing an md5 of the whole disc may work, but you may run into padding
issues, where the CD has padding that the ISO doesn't.  You can md5sum
the individual files within the ISO easily enough and that will solve
the padding issue.

Unfortunately, simply doing md5sums on the invididual files won't tell
you if a particular file was only readable after trying for several
seconds or minutes.  So, an md5sum is a good first try at verifying, but
we found that using that as our verification mechanism meant that we had
a substantial number of users getting unreadable discs from us.

Sean
-- 
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Sean Reifschneider, Member of Technical Staff <jafo at tummy.com>
tummy.com, ltd. - Linux Consulting since 1995.  Qmail, Python, SysAdmin