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Re: Checking the md5sum of a burned CD



On 2009-03-19_15:39:56, T o n g wrote:
> On Thu, 19 Mar 2009 04:33:09 -0500, M. Lewis wrote:
> 
> > I've burned a CD from a .iso image. Now I want to verify the burning
> > process worked correctly (there were no errors reported). Note, I
> > verified the md5sums of the .iso's before I burned them. So now I'd like
> > to check the burned CD against that md5sum.
> 
> The best approach for checking burned CDs, which is what Red Hat used, is 
> implanting a MD5 checksum to it by implantisomd5, and verify later with 
> checkisomd5. 
> 
> So the CD itself and checkisomd is all you need to verify it, even after 
> several years, and you've forgot where you put its original md5sum. The 
> implantisomd5 and checkisomd5 are available in Debian (later) as the 
> isomd5sum package.

I think you are misunderstanding the situation, or perhaps, I
misunderstand what you intend to say. Computing a checksum, does not,
by itself, verify the correctness of the CD. You must have knowledge
of what the md5sum of the original .iso was, and you must get that
same md5sum value from running the program 'md5sum' on the CD. Of
course, if you can't even read the CD into the md5sum program, then it
is surely a bad CD. Can you mount the CD, and examine its contents?
If you cannot, then producing an md5sum for it is pointless. If you
can mount it, there may be, somewhere on it, a record of what its
md5sum should be. But an md5sum of a CD, alone, is useless.

-- 
Paul E Condon           
pecondon@mesanetworks.net


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