hello everybody! my name's max and i'm new on this list.
i'd like to post a question which i think will be interesting, at least for us newbies :) i finally rsync'd the pseudo images for potato binary-i386-1_NONUS.iso and binary-i386-2.iso and they checked the md5sums all right. then i burned the first image under win98 with nero as described in http://cdimage.debian.org/faq.html and all seemed ok; i even successfully booted the cd. i still had the .iso file on the hd, and was thinking about deleting it... but a sudden doubt arose: would it be possible to recreate the exact iso image from the burned cd? i fired up linux (i use slackware 7.1 at this time), ripped the cd this way: dd if=/dev/hdb of=image.iso then i waited some time... i got an i/o error but i did not bother (someone told me not to) and surprise! the image.iso i obtained was ok, as i was able to mount it (with -o loop option) and see the files in it but... the dimension in bytes was different from the original image i downloaded... and obviously the md5sum didn't match. how could i be sure that the image i ripped was good? or, for that matter, that the cd burn had gone ok? i repeat: the cd was readable and bootable, and the ripped image.iso was mountable and readable. then i thought: maybe it's win98 and nero's fault. let's do it all in linux. so i fired up cdrecord, burned the second image (binary-i386-2.iso) like this: nice --18 cdrecord -eject -v speed=8 dev=0,0,0 -data -pad binary-i386-2.iso as was told in http://cdimage.debian.org/faq.html and then i mounted the obtained cd, looked a bit in it and the files were there; then i ripped it, this time (being lazy) using this: cat /dev/hdb > image.iso again i/o error but a perfectly mountable iso9660 image... but again NO MATCH IN BYTES DIMENSION, namely: binary-i386-2.iso: 665292800 bytes image.iso: 665323520 bytes so. 1) how can i be sure everything is ok before deleting the downloaded images? 2) how can i rip a new iso9660 image from a burned cd that is exactly identical to the original image, so the it checks against the size AND md5sum of the original image? i was forgetting a detail, maybe it's important: the original images are in a win98 partition that i mounted from linux with mount -t vfat etc... so all the operations i described (cdrecording, md5summing, and size checking) were made with such an arrangement (but i don't think it matters as filesize is concerned, right?) ok, i hope that someone gets my message and is willing to help. thank u people. bye.
