quick (and perhaps foolish) question: MD4sum of CD

[Leonard den Ottolander]

Hello Robert,

> > > "md5sum /dev/cdrom"

> i'm pretty sure i have had perfectly good CDs produce a bad MD5 sum
> when running the above command.
> 
> is it possible that there would be extraneous junk at the tail end
> of the CD that would throw off the checksum?

 Maybe the error output also gets used in the checksum generation. As said, 
I use dd | md5sum for this. In that case I get correct checksums even if I 
do not specify a bs and count and see I/O errors. Probably because the 
error output does not get piped to md5sum.

 Ok, I did a test of md5sum /dev/cdrom[1] on both my cd-player and cd-
writer. I get a correct result with the writer, and no result due to an I/O 
error with the player (ie it chokes at the end of the disk, dd with no 
count works fine).

Bye,
Leonard.

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