Basic Question:

How do I check the 2nd Slackware 9.1 CD to see if it is corrupt?

Details:

Since I installed Slackware 9.1 about a week ago I've been having some problems with misc. things. Since there were two fatal errors on the install, I thought it had something to do with a possible corrupt download of Slackware or maybe there was a glitch in the burning process.

I decided to check the Cd's (downloaded from linuxiso) w/ the MD5 checksum on the CDs themselves. I do not know if this is the correct way to do it but this is how i did it. I downloaded the MD5 tool for windows, and browsed every CD from within windows. The first CD has a CHECKSUMS.md5 file. After double clicking on it, the tool showed 9 errors. 8 of them appeared to be info about the tool. They weren't files but more like sentences saying how to use the tool. I really didn't understand it. The 9th one was a file though, and it was one of the source files which is one place where I had a fatal error the first time. Therefore I decided to re-download (this time w/ bit-torrent) and re-burn the CDs. After that, the 1st CD only had the 8 weird errors so I figured it at least had to be better and was maybe fixed. The second CD is another story though.

It appears to have 3 different checksum files in three different directory. I believe there were over 500 errors total when you add the errors up from each checksum file. There were the exact same number of errors in both the linuxiso CD and the bit-torrent CD. I just assumed that meant I was doing something wrong in the checking process and the CDs were probably both fine. However, upon reinstalling, I got another fatal error after putting the 2nd CD in which I was going to post here but the error in the install timed out while I was typing this. I think it had something to do w/ some .tgz file or something. I might just have to reinstall again if it is important to know the error. It said something about it possibly being corrupt or nonexistent or a few other possibilities. It said it might be possible to continue but if it was important, it might not work well.

Thanks for your help and sorry for the length

daniel

All you need to do is run MD5SUM on the second CD. Basically, open up a terminal session to get to the dollar prompt, and then the syntax of MD5SUM is simply: md5sum <filename> Thus, if Disk #1 was named "disk1.img" then you would just enter: md5sum disk1.img and of course you would repeat the process for Disk #2. The output of MD5SUM will be a long string of letters and numbers, which should match *exactly* to the reference value. If it doesn't, then your image is corrupt. (You can get the reference values from linuxiso.)

Note that it's useful to run MD5SUM twice: once after you d/l the image to verify that it's correct, and then again after you've burned it to CD. The point of the first run is to avoid coasters, and the second run confirms that your image is intact. BTW you can do all of this in Slack, and you don't (and shouldn't) need to use Windows to confirm your checksums. -- J.W.