mediacheck failing ...

[Andre Robatino]

Gene Heskett wrote:
> On Friday 23 November 2007, Andre Robatino wrote:
>   
>> David Timms wrote:
>>     
>>> Andre Robatino wrote:
>>>       
>>>> Andre Robatino wrote:
>>>>         
>>>>>  I'm pretty sure that it was fixed, or at least less likely to
>>>>> manifest.  I was using the same computer, with the same DVD drive,
>>>>> when F7 came out, and found by going through a pile of old Fedora
>>>>> CDs that I burned without padding that all of them passed mediacheck
>>>>> anyway, though many of them failed earlier.  Testing now with F8, I
>>>>> find that 3 out of 3 of them fail (I was convinced at that point and
>>>>> stopped checking).
>>>>>           
>>>>  Just to clarify, the mediacheck I'm talking about is checkisomd5
>>>> from the anaconda-runtime package, which is the equivalent of the
>>>> regular mediacheck, but done while booted up in a currently installed
>>>> Fedora.  So my mediacheck was using the kernel in the distro being
>>>> used at the time (F7/F8), not the kernel on the old install discs
>>>> themselves, as would have been the case if I booted from them.
>>>>         
>>> http://docs.fedoraproject.org/release-notes/f8/en_US/sn-Installer.html
>>> find mediacheck
>>>
>>> This suggests certain hdparm parameters get applied when you boot the
>>> dvd and start linux mediacheck, this wouldn't happen if you are
>>> running from a live f7/8.
>>>
>>> Also there is suggestion to try:
>>> ide=nodma mediacheck
>>> in https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=177526
>>>
>>> Does either make any difference ?
>>>       
>>  I thought that using the word "mediacheck" only caused the installer
>> to go to the mediacheck immediately, instead of asking first, so we only
>> tried the "ide=nodma" option, which didn't help.  The latter, at least,
>> is definitely not a reliable workaround, but applying the proper
>> zero-padding seems to be.  Even if the ide=nodma works, one has to
>> remember to use it during the actual install, not just the mediacheck,
>> then to remove it from grub.conf later, since any options used during
>> install end up there.
>>     
>
> As has been stated here before, the only reliable way to do the mediacheck 
> once the disk is burnt, is to call up something like kcalc, enter the size of 
> the iso image as it sits on your hard drive, and divide by 2048, the size of 
> a 'sector' on a cd/dvd.  Then use the answer as the count= in a command line 
> to dd that looks something like this:
>
> dd if=/dev/dvd0 bs=2048, count=answer-above|sha1sum
>
> Then a readahead bug doesn't have a chance because you are only reading 
> exactly the size of the .iso image.
>
>   
  I always use the rawread script from

http://www.troubleshooters.com/linux/coasterless.htm

which does all this automatically.  The readahead bug prevents the last 
tiny little bit of the ISO at the end from actually being read, so 
knowing how big the ISO is supposed to be doesn't help since the part 
that's readable is smaller than that.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: smime.p7s
Type: application/x-pkcs7-signature
Size: 3253 bytes
Desc: S/MIME Cryptographic Signature
Url : http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/users/attachments/20071123/94c219a6/attachment-0001.bin