[PLUG] Inconsistent MD5SUM results on ISO files

Shahms E. King shahms at shahms.com
Tue May 14 05:09:11 UTC 2002


Unfortunately, this sounds like bad hardware, I had similar problems
myself, back with 7.2, only I managed to get it installed occasionally
only to have it compeletely hose itself after a random amount of time. 
Really frustrating.  There are a couple of possibilities, what other
hardware are you using? It *COULD* be the harddrive, but it might also
be motherboard, processor or RAM.  I ended up replacing all of those
trying to track down the problem, and the only conclusion I managed to
come to was that it wasn't the RAM.  The harddrive was failing (same
model as yours), but I think that was unrelated coincident failing,
seeing as I replaced it and things kept not working.  I had been using
an AMD Athlon proc. with a Via chipset motherboard, both of which got
replaced at the same time, and almost immediately afterwards I heard
about the issues with the Athlons (can't remember exactly what they were
right now) and I had previously heard reports of problems with the Via
chipsets, so I'm convinced my problems were in one of those areas.

Hopefully I'm just jumping to conclusions and it turns out to be
something simple though...


--Shahms

On Mon, 2002-05-13 at 21:42, Marc wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> After repeated errors installing RedHat 7.3 on another box using some
> freshly-burned ISOs, I decided to check if my originals had the right MD5SUMs.
> With three ISOs to check, I tried
> 
> % md5sum valhalla-i386-disc*
> 
> The value returned for disc1 was correct, but not for disks 2 and 3.  For some
> reason I tried it again, and this time I got three incorrect sums.  Repeated
> attempts on a single ISO show ever-changing values:
> 
> % md5sum valhalla-i386-disc1.iso
> 59ea7973386287fe95152b0dff1f37e7  valhalla-i386-disc1.iso
> % md5sum valhalla-i386-disc1.iso
> 60e1d3f990eed0d3fe2622c917ec1a82  valhalla-i386-disc1.iso
> % md5sum valhalla-i386-disc1.iso
> cd1cad8642579dc58ff63288fe5c404f  valhalla-i386-disc1.iso
> % md5sum valhalla-i386-disc1.iso
> 2f59a52896c10b9f39a5588b8bebc387  valhalla-i386-disc1.iso
> 
> I am running RedHat 7.1 with my own 2.4.18 kernel.  The FS is ext2 and the disk
> is an IBM 45 GB Deskstar 75GXP.  I see no (other) indications the disk is
> having any problems.
> 
> Any thoughts what might be going wrong?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Marc
> 






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