quick (and perhaps foolish) question: MD4sum of CD

Robert P. J. Day rpjday at mindspring.com
Fri Sep 26 15:17:53 UTC 2003


On Fri, 26 Sep 2003, Leonard den Ottolander wrote:

> Hello Tom,
> 
> > "md5sum /dev/cdrom"
> 
> > The problem with that is that it is possible for it to
> > fail and the cd still be good or so I am told.
> 
>  Why would that be? Were you told that as well? The above mentioned errors 
> should not cause md5sum to produce a wrong result.

i'm pretty sure i have had perfectly good CDs produce a bad MD5 sum
when running the above command.  note -- i didn't say their ISO
image files would produce a bad MD5 sum, just running "md5sum"
against the burned CD in the drive.

is it possible that there would be extraneous junk at the tail end
of the CD that would throw off the checksum?

rday





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