Knoppix CD does not boot.

[Taeke]

Hi Harry,
There were a number of problems with MD5. I tried different offerings which I found on Internet. Some command line based, some with GUI like from toast442. This last one appealed to me as it is about drag and drop. Could handle that one, I thought. No such luck. The drag part worked OK, but dropping? No way.
At last I found "fsum". This one generated a new MD5 file which, however, was completely different from the one supplied with Knoppix. So, back to the drawing board.
As it takes me about 6,5 hours to download Knoppix, it may take some time before I get results. I will let you know if things work out.
Best, Taeke.

[Harry Kuhman]

Hi Harry,
There were a number of problems with MD5. I tried different offerings which I found on Internet. Some command line based, some with GUI like from toast442. This last one appealed to me as it is about drag and drop. Could handle that one, I thought. No such luck. The drag part worked OK, but dropping? No way.
At last I found "fsum". This one generated a new MD5 file which, however, was completely different from the one supplied with Knoppix. So, back to the drawing board.
As it takes me about 6,5 hours to download Knoppix, it may take some time before I get results. I will let you know if things work out.
Best, Taeke.

Not sure where your problems are. Here's my experience:

The first tool I used when I first got Knoppix was a command line tool called md5sums. It is available here: http://www.pc-tools.net/win32/
It works.

md5.ex from toast442.org also works. It has a GUI and drag-and-drop. What it lacks is 1) passing in a file name on start-up, so you can't create a relation between the md5 extension and then just click on an md5 file and have the program test what is in the md5 file. And 2) it lacks any sort of activity or progress indication. So it just looks brain dead while it is calculating a MD5 sum. This can take a few minutes with something as large as Knoppix, so it might be working for you and you don't even know it. To use this application do one of two things. Start the GUI application first and then either 1) be sure the radio button is on "check files" and drag a file with an md5 extension into the GUI window (and drop it). After it computes the MD5 sums of the files listed in the md5 file, it will tell you if the md5 sum matches or not (and expect this to take a few minutes with nohelpful sign from md5.exe that it is running) or 2) change the radio button to "generate checksums" and then drag the knoppix iso file into the window. Drop it. Wait. Go to the bathroom. Come back. Wait a little longer. Finally, after giving you no sign that it was doing anything, the md5 sum of the iso will be shown in the window. Manually compare it to the text string in the md5 file or the md5.asc file (or any md5 string you find on the website you downloaded your iso from).

As I say, the toast442 program has flaws. If you find a better one that gets past these issues, please let me know. But these programs do work. I've used both of them a lot, and consider them very important for testing iso downloads, particularly the knoppix iso downloads.

[Taeke]

Hi Harry,
You are really quick, you know that? Thanks to your instructions about the toast md5-checker, I got it working as expected. As you said, nothing happens for a while after dropping the iso file to be checked. Then, after a few minutes, the magic happens and all of a sudden the box is filled with nice hex code. Unfortunately they are quite different indeed from the checkfile sent down with the download. Because there are no indications that the program is functioning is what fooled me last night.
Best, Taeke.

[Harry Kuhman]

... Unfortunately they are quite different indeed from the checkfile sent down with the download.......

Yup, that's what I expected from your problems (and my own bad experience with the Knoppix mirrors). You can keep trying mirrors, some do give you a good file. But I plan on getting my future Knoppix ISOs by BitTorrent, you might want to also.

[Taeke]

Hi Harry,
Sunday night I set the computer to download the Knoppix.iso from another mirror. This time everything went right. During boot up of the CD-rom no error reports whatsoever.

The program takes the correct time from my system, but it thinks I am in the USA. Whe I change that to Western Europe, also the time is changed accordingly. Funny.

What still bothers me is that the size of the 7 partitions on my two hard drives are still not correctly reported. As before, the properties for each of them shows 390 B (whatever that may be) and also each of them reports something as 191 MB (2%) available from a total of 193 MB. That seems to be about the ramdisk, but I did not request that information. So what is going on? Can you shed some light on this?

Best Taeke.