On Thursday 03 March 2005 13:40, Collins Richey wrote:
> On Thu, 3 Mar 2005 11:22:40 -0500, Lamar Owen <lowen@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > On Thursday 03 March 2005 10:53, William Warren wrote:
> > > hrmm. I have burned several sets of CentOS 3 and 4 cd's and
> > > DVD's without issue under win2k sp4 using nero 5.x. with a nec
> > > burner single layer 4x dvd burner flashed to an 8x dual layer dvd
> > > burner.
> > You got lucky, I believe.
> I find all of this moderately ridiculous.
I find the whole deal ridiculous in that when a simple piece of advice is
given to try to help make more reliable installs people attempt to disect it.
That is what is ridiculous.
> I've burned ISO's for 6-8 years on a variety of computers, linux, and
> windows systems at various recording speeds without using the -pad
> value recommended here, and I've never yet burned an ISO that turned
> out to be unusable with the possible exception of bad media.
Are you sure it was bad media? Why not google for the situation;
http://www.troubleshooters.com/linux/coasterless.htm is a good primer on the
subject.
The point was and is that CD's can fail mediacheck (I myself saw this with
CentOS 4 Beta where four out of five CD's failed mediacheck) but then INSTALL
FINE. I saw this, again, in an actual install on modern hardware using the
very CD drive that burned the name-brand media; that is, mediacheck failed
all but one of the install discs, but all of the install discs installed
FINE. I have burned over a thousand discs over a period of several years as
well, and have had the experience of having media fail mediacheck on a fairly
high percentage, until I began using the padding, and at that point no more
failures.
> As someone reported later in this thread, this probably has more to do
> with certain flaky CD hardware and IDE chips than with any real
> requirement.
I would be that person, as well as the original poster of the thread.
> I would love to read a discussion of this problem by CD
> writing gurus.
Ok, the person in question was Aaron Brown at Red Hat. Google for him
(abrown@xxxxxxxxxx); he worked in QA at Red Hat for a long time. Also see
the following links for 'discussions' of this:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/beta/show_bug.cgi?id=137217
http://www.troubleshooters.com/linux/coasterless.htm
http://www.fedoraforum.org/forum/archive/index.php/t-2099.html
http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-12161.html
http://www.keithl.com/knoppixdisks.html
There is a lot of misinformation out there, that is for sure.
The fact of the matter is that real-world hardware possessed by a large number
of people need padding. The solution is to pad. Pad properly and the
problem goes away. Nothing complex at all about it, and Red Hat for one has
been following that mantra for at least 4 years now.
> If someone is having a problem with CentOS ISO's, perhaps this is
> worth a try, but to state this as a universal truth seems to be beyond
> the mark.
The post said 'recommended' and the recomendation was by someone who had found
through trial and error (lots of trial and error, being that he was in Red
Hat's QA department!) that padding fixed the problems when nothing else
(including ide=nodma) would not. Recommended!=universal truth.
Another recommendation was made to pre-pad the ISO's. This appears that it
might work; I'm not going to take the time to check with media if it does or
doesn't work; using the anaconda checkiosmd5 tool on a prepadded ISO does
return and exit code of 0, so it seems a prepadded ISO would pass mediacheck
IF it is actually read correctly off the CD (I did the test on my hard drive,
which is not the same as doing it off of CD, obviously).
This is my last post on the subject since people seem to be more interested in
splitting hairs than in helping people get a good burn on their hardware.
And whether their hardware is broken or not is irrelevant; there is a
recommendation that works for the vast majority of people that have the
problem, and I simply looked through my archives to try to help people get a
good burn. If I had known that people were going to nitpick my post I would
not have bothered looking through my archives, nor would I have posted it.
--
Lamar Owen
Director of Information Technology
Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute
1 PARI Drive
Rosman, NC 28772
(828)862-5554
www.pari.edu
