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In order to burn the 2 CD i386 binary set of 2.1r3 I ftp'd the
images to my Win98 machine as I don't currently have a CD burner in my Linux
box. I have successfully used these CD's to create Linux systems.
These CD's were burned using EZ CD Creator using image mode. But because I
have limited storage on my Win98 machine I also burned the image files,
binary-i386-1.iso and binary-i386-2.iso in file mode to two CD's so that I
could delete them from my hard drive and restore them later should I wish.
After burning them to the CD's I did a byte by byte comparison of the CD's vs
the disk files on my Win98 machine using DOS command fc/b and found them to be
identical.
Being properly paranoid I wanted a 'second opinion' which I
could get by running md5sum on the files. The md5sum is provided on the
various mirror sites for the disk images. I needed to get the files
to my Linux machine to run md5sum.
So I took the first CD, which contained the file
binary-i386-1.iso and copied is from my CD reader on my Linux machine to my
home directory on my hard drive. I ran md5sum on the hard drive file and
obtain the correct checksum, as is reported in the file MD5SUMS.txt. I am
thus confident that the file I now have on my hard drive is identical to the
file I ftp'd from the mirror site to my Win98 machine, burned on a CD-ROM,
carried to my Linux machine etc...
But when I run md5sum against the same file on the CD-ROM I
get a different md5sum!!
So from my home directory I ran cmp binary-i386-1.iso
/cdrom/binary-i386-1.iso and no differences are found between the
files.
I have repeated this process several times, its entirely
reproducible.
Two identical files produce different md5sums! How can
this be?
Ron
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