Bug#35940: marked as done (Should check md5sums before beginning installation)
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and subject line Should check md5sums before beginning installation
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Message-ID: <3711A875.EEEF3D22@mincom.com>
Date: Mon, 12 Apr 1999 18:01:57 +1000
From: Martin Pool <martinp@mincom.com>
Organization: Mincom Pty Ltd
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To: bugs@bugs.debian.org
Subject: Should check md5sums before beginning installation
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This is a suggestion for improving the Debian installation process.
Make of it what you will.
I started installing Debian slink/x86 the other weekend. I backed-up
and removed the NT installation, repartitioned, rebooted, and started
selecting packages. Just as I was counting my chickens, package
installations started mysteriously failing, leaving me with a machine
with no functioning operating system.
It turned out later that a faulty CD burner at my supplier had left
blocks of zeros all over the disks: unfortunately, the first binary disc
had enough data left to start the installation and make me _think_
everything was going OK. The failure messages for corrupt packages were
a bit weird, but that's another story.
So, the lesson I learnt was to always check the md5sums before beginning
installation: I eventually took the discs to another Linux machine and
did exactly that and found the problem. However, if I hadn't had
another Unix machine already set up and with a CD drive there would have
been no easy way to check. This particular problem happened with
writable CDs, but I can imagine people getting similar problems with
network downloads, etc.
It'd be a real win for installation friendliness if there was some means
to check the integrity of the installation images _before_ destroying
the existing setup. Perhaps early in the install script a question like
"Do you want to check your CDs for errors? This may take several
minutes." would be appropriate. The implementation's surely pretty
simple: just a find|md5sum|diff with appropriate wrapping. It might be
good as well or instead to distribute a dos version of md5sum (or a
little program to check the sums) in the dostools/ directory, so that
people can check the discs if they already have DOS or W32 installed.
--
/\\\ Mincom | Martin Pool | martin.pool@mincom.com
// \\\ | Software Engineer | Phone: +61 7 3303-3333
\\ /// | Mincom Pty. Ltd. |
\/// | Teneriffe, Brisbane | Speaking for myself only
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