[WBEL-users] 4.0 media check blues

Kirby C. Bohling kbohling at birddog.com
Tue May 17 21:06:21 CDT 2005


On Tue, May 17, 2005 at 06:40:25PM -0700, Randy wrote:
> I've downloaded manifestdestiny and they md5sumed 
> OK. Burned a set of CDs with Nero 6.0, but when I install 
> they all fail the media check. Since the checksum is 
> OK, I ass-ume the download is good. Cut another set 
> of CDs using Paragon with the same results. I'm using 
> the same machine/CDrom to burn and install. I tried 
> 2 other PC's and the media check always fails. The 
> installation seems to startup and run OK. 
> 
> Can anyone suggest what the problem might be, please.

Have you tried md5sum'ing the actual disks themselves?  The CD's
after being burnt should have the same md5sum.  Do you get the same
file if you build an ISO off of the burnt CD's?  Sometimes there is
a padding issue if you suck an image off of CD, so ensure the file
sizes are exactly the same before you start.  If the image pulled
from the cd is slightly larger, you might have to trim it down to
exactly the same size as the original ISO.  I've had to do this
before.

Did you do the obvious and verify the burn after you burnt the CD?
I'm fairly sure Nero has that option.

This might be a chicken and the egg problem.  Have you tried using
Linux based tools to burn the ISO's?

What speed did you burn the ISO's at?  I've known people who had
problems with CD's burnt at high speed, but normally it's when they
put them in Laptop drives.

These last two are more desparation then anything else:

What make and model of CD-ROM do you have?  I know on laptops they
used to recommed that you turn DMA off on if mediacheck consistantly
failed.  I forget the boot option for it, I want to say, "nodma" or
ide=nodma or something like that.

Trying to look up the nodma command I came across this, it might be
useful:
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2005-April/msg01532.html

It looks like several other people have been having long standing
media check problems with FC releases. Upon which I believe RHEL4
and thus WBEL 4 are built.

Have you memory tested the machine (I've had things that looked
great on disk when checked, but when you read them into memory
they'd get corrupted, so depending on the memory usage of md5sum and
the CD burner that might be it).


    Thanks,
        Kirby


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