On 8 Oct 2002, John Weber wrote: > On Tue, 2002-10-08 at 06:17, Michael Schwendt wrote: > > Safer: > > > > $ md5sum /dev/cdrom > > Is this the supposed to be the same test as the mediacheck routine? I > tried this on both an umounted and mounted disc #1 and in both cases it > appears to read the disk for a few minutes and then gives > > [jweber@ceora RH8.0]$ md5sum /dev/cdrom > md5sum: /dev/cdrom: Input/output error The md5sum is similar but not the same as the linux mediacheck. The mediacheck compares a stored checksum with the checksum of almost all of the rest of the disk. Running md5sum /dev/cdrom will checksum the whole disk. However, as this often includes extra blank sectors at the end, you frequently the wrong answer, plus it may try to read beyond the end of the disk, which is why you got the above error. If you want to get the advertised iso checksums, work out how long the disk should be and just checksum that bit, eg. for disk 1 dd if=/dev/cdrom bs=1024 count=659488 | md5sum Michael Young
