FC3 coasters

[Paul Howarth]

Dave Roberts wrote:
> On Tue, 2004-11-16 at 08:23, Paul Howarth wrote:
> 
>>Most likely all of your CDs are fine. Try booting using "linux ide=nodma".
> 
> I had this problem too and was trying to figure out what was wrong. I
> have not yet tried the linux ide=nodma solution. When should I be
> entering that? When I'm first booting for the install?

Yes; at the first prompt you get after booting the CD, where you would 
normally just press return to start the installer, type "linux ide=nodma" and 
then press return.

>>You can check that your ISO downloads are OK by comparing the md5sums with 
>>those published on the download site:
>>
>>md5sum -c MD5SUM
> 
> 
> So I have done that. The sums all check. It seems I have the isos all
> downloaded correctly.

Yes.

>>You can check that your burned CDs are OK by getting the data back off the CD 
>>and either comparing the file with the original ISO or checking its md5sum.
>>
>>dd if=/dev/cdrom of=burned-iso-1.iso bs=16384
>>cmp burned-iso-1.iso FC3-i386-disc1.iso
>>md5sum burned-iso-1.iso  (then compare the result with that in the MD5SUM file)
> 
> 
> So this does not work for me. The dd command completes with an error for
> every CD I try this with. When I do the cmp command, it always tells me
> that the dd-created iso is short, which it is by byte count. Everything
> appears to match up to that point, but it looks like dd isn't getting
> all the info.

That does look suspicious. Do you get the same issue if you boot into your 
current installation with ide=nodma (try adding it to the end of the kernel 
line in your /etc/grub.conf and rebooting)?

> Now, I also tried this on an older FC1 CD that I had laying around and
> the same thing happens.
> 
> I'm not very familiar with dd, having always used it to simply do basic
> conversions (byte-swapping, etc.). Does use of this command really
> create a full iso image? Knowing what I know about it, I would think
> that it would just pick up the user data in the file system and that you
> would still be missing the TOC info, etc. Does that explain the file
> size difference?

The ISO filesystem written to the CD *is* the user data; you shouldn't be 
getting back anything else.

Paul.