Yesterday, I made a clean install of CentOS 4.0. I usually skip the media check, but I thought that this time round I would try it. Anyway all of my disks failed the check, but suprisingly installed fine. I had a similar experience in the past with Fedora Core 2. What I would like to find out, is whether other people have actually managed to do a successful media check and the media passed. I am beginning to question the usefulness of this feature if it doesn't work properly at all. On the other hand I don't know if the failure is caused by the type of disks I use (Imation 52x compatible CD-Rs).

reddazz: Yes, I routinely/successfully run media check the first time I use a new set of CDs and it has worked on every system I have tried it on, unless there was an underlying hardware issue, like bad memory or an iffy CD drive. With bad memory, the linux installation would usually go OK, but unexplained problems would pop up every so often.

Also, if you are overclocking the system clock, you may be having intermittent and random memory failures that cause the media check to fail, whereas the system seems to run fine. Try running a few full cycles of memtest86 (www.memtest86.com) and see if you are having memory problems.

My memory is definitley fine, its quite new and passes the memtest. The CD's were new as well (just been burnt). Next time I'll try burn them at a lower speed and see if this makes a difference.

Im not positive about this, but I remember reading somewhere that the media check that comes with fedora is extremely unreliable. . . and how can you trust a mediacheck that is contained on the media you are checking. . . . the program could be corrupt from reading it off the CD. You should check the media in OS before you boot from it.

reddazz: I burn my FC.iso CDs at max speed on a 52x32x52x CD-RW drive and have never had a problem with the CDs.

Make sure you don't have Boot on power set in your BIOS

You Know? When you plug you power cord in the pc boots up.

I always kick myself when i forget this.

Something about needing clean ram when you do a media check.

Well, when FC4 is relased, I'll try your suggestions and see if I pass the test. Like I said, the installation media always works fine, but never passes the test.

I've been burning my linux distro's at 4x since Redhat 7, & media check seems to work fine, I on the other hand had downloaded Fedora Core 4 Test 2 and media check failed them all So I did another shot with a different download place and media check failed all the disk again? I'm thinking that it is just a quirk in the test version of Fedora 4 But like i say Fedora's 1,2,3 test 2's all passed media check.

Now I'm not sure to go ahead and use the disk? or maybe wait a little still?

If you can't pass the media check, you could done a harddrive or network installation, where you don't need the iso's burned.

Media check usually passes with SCSI drives.
With IDE drives - you need to burn with

cdrecord -dao -pad

fedora core 3 will pass media check on MOST atapi cdrom drives if burned with those options.

mediacheck in the fc4test series is currently broken.

I have a machine that ALWAYS errors out on the media check, or errors later in the install if I don't use the ide=nodma boot option. You might try that.

I downloaded the CentOS 4.0 dvd iso image and burnt that to dvd +r and passed the media check for the first time ever. I didn't pass any options at boot time, I just selected the normal graphical install.