[TheMad]

Greetings.

Somewhat recently, I decided to install linux onto my otherwise pure windows machine. I started with Mandrake 9.0 on a recommendation from someone, and enjoyed it a bunch. However, just recently I decided to replace Mandrake with Red Hat 8.0, so I downloaded the 5 CDs and burned them all. When I went to install Red Hat, it asked me if I wanted to perform a CD check on all of the CDs. So I went ahead and started testing them. All of the CDs resulted in a FAIL except for disc 5. Now, as far as I know, nothing is wrong with my burner. I find it highly unlikely that my burner somehow screwed up the first 4 CDs yet the last one turned out all right. The CDs I burned RH onto were all 650 MB, but the ISOs were less than that (albeit just barely) and I didn't receive any errors from my burning program while burning. I've used it to burn other CDs and its worked fine every time. My question is is this normal? Is there perhaps some bug in the installer that causes it to not recognize the CDs as the correct media, or is it that I should redownload the first 4 ISOs and burn them again? Thanks in advance.

TheMad

[codejockey]

You are most likely correct -- your burner is fine, and the problem lies elsewhere. My guess is that you had one or more errors during the download of each of the first 4 images (this is actually fairly common). Only the last image downloaded without an error, which is why it can install properly. If your download site reports the MD5 checksums, you should use those to verify your image after downloading and before burning -- then if you have an error, it has to be due to media or the burner. Compare the published MD5 checksum(s) with the one(s) you compute on each image after downloading (use the md5sum command to compute the checksum for the downloaded image). If the sums match, you know you have a good copy. If not, erase the image, and try again ...

Hope this helps.

[TheMad]

Is there a way to check the md5sums in Windows XP?

TheMad

[lynch]

Try this: MD5Summer works with XP.
HTH
lynch