need help downloading 4.02 dvd

I've also had some trouble downloading the DVD version. I tried a straight ftp d/l because of the speed advantage over torrents, but it cratered out about 87% complete. So I fired up Azureus, clicked on the torrent link and pointed it to where my partial download was. It was slow, about 20K most of the time, but did fill in the rest of the file. The problem started when I checked the MD5, didn't match. So started Azureus again and used 'force recheck' repeatedly to try and get it right. Also turned off the quick recheck option so it would automatically recheck whenever the file was complete. Did this off and on for two weeks and never did get a correct download. Also tried Shadow's BT program. This system is running win98, a p3 500, FAT32, cable internet with a linksys router. I really wanted to use this system because I had just installed a new (and very cheap) dvd burner in it.

Decided there had to be a better way. I installed Azureus on my daughter's computer, a 1.3 ghz AMD with XP home and also a FAT32 filesystem, also hooked up to the above mentioned router. Fired it up and couldn't believe the difference! It downloaded the torrent at an average of around 200k and I noticed it went above 300k a few times. As far as I can tell all of the settings were the same on both units. I think a little extra horsepower and the xp OS makes a big difference running Azureus. Only took about 5 hours to complete the d/l. The MD5 checked out fine.

Next step was to get the ISO on the win 98 machine. Tried a file splitter but the result also would not pass the MD5 check. Thought about file transfer over the network but have never tried that before, and didn't want to take the time to learn to do it at that particular time. So I removed the burner from the win 98 machine and hooked it up to the XP machine. I then booted up Slax to memory on it and used k3b to burn a couple of Knoppix DVD's. Worked great. I also burned a DVD with just the ISO file on it. The md5 checked out on this file also. The knoppix dvd seemed to work fine on the xp machine. Removed the burner and put it back in the p3 win 98 system. Booted up the knoppix dvd, worked fine. Rebooted with both Slax and win 98 and the dvd with ISO file passed the md5 check from those systems both times. Used Slax to copy the ISO to each of my 2 hard drives- MD5 does NOT check out on the hard drive copies? I don't know why this is.

My only theories so far is that maybe the bios (1999) is too old to handle these large files, or maybe there's a limitation in the processor somehow. As far as I can tell, my hard drives are OK. Also when I'm running win 98, I can't copy those ISO files, get an error- something like invalid parameter- it can't handle copying that large a file. Knoppix or Slax don't seem to have a problem, though. Shouldn't be the FAT32 system per se, but I just can't get a correct MD5 from a DVD ISO when it's on my hard drives.
Any ideas why this would be? Sorry for the long post, but this has me puzzled.

BTW, the Knoppix DVD is VERY impressive.

Thanks

I could be totally off base here, but is it possible that the real-time md5 hashing was too much for your Pentium III? Bittorrent actually compares every chunk of the file that it gets to a hash that comes with the chunk. That could be a laborious task for your processor, so I'm thinking that may have been the problem. Regardless, glad you got it working on the AMD machine. Welcome to the Knoppix community!

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Originally Posted by xfiles

I've also had some trouble downloading the DVD version. I tried a straight ftp d/l because of the speed advantage over torrents, but it cratered out about 87% complete. So I fired up Azureus, clicked on the torrent link and pointed it to where my partial download was. It was slow, about 20K most of the time, but did fill in the rest of the file.

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In my experience, BitTorrent has been much faster than the mirrors. It's also been much more reliable; many of my FTP downloads of Knoppix before BitTorrent were bad (and only Knoppix downloads have ever had this problem for me, not other downloads). BitTorrent has been 100%. Looking at the current number of seeders and downloaders, the download speed should be very good still. I suspect strongly that your system is not set up properly for BitTorrent. If you have a router you must forward the correct ports, and you must open any software firewall for incoming traffic on those ports too. Unless you do this, BitTorrent will work, but will be slow by design. This has been well documented in many places.

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Originally Posted by xfiles

I really wanted to use this system because I had just installed a new (and very cheap) dvd burner in it.

Decided there had to be a better way. I installed Azureus on my daughter's computer, a 1.3 ghz AMD with XP home and also a FAT32 filesystem, also hooked up to the above mentioned router. Fired it up and couldn't believe the difference! It downloaded the torrent at an average of around 200k and I noticed it went above 300k a few times. As far as I can tell all of the settings were the same on both units. I think a little extra horsepower and the xp OS makes a big difference running Azureus. Only took about 5 hours to complete the d/l. ....

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While I would have put the new DVD burner in the higher end system, I don't think what you saw was due to the difference in CPU's. I've been using an old AMD P6 as my BitTorrent system simply because I can dedicate it to seeding after a download completes and just let it run. It's about the speed of your first system and downloads quite quickly. Transfering the final ISO to be burned to the system with my DVD burner is a different issue under Win98, but as I posted previously I have resolved this a few ways including local FTP transfers. You may want to go back and revisit the slower system and see if you can't configure things to make it give you acceptable BitTorrent performance.

The above results were with BitTorrent, not Azureus, so if there is a CPU bottleneck it likely was Azureus. If you can't find anything else to fix and you still want to use the slower system with the burner on it, I would suggest trying the real BitTorrent client on it, I see no advantage to Azureus and if it does eat that much CPU then there is a big disadvantage to using it. You might even download faster with the BitTorrent client if Azureus was the bottleneck.

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Originally Posted by xfiles

Next step was to get the ISO on the win 98 machine. Tried a file splitter but the result also would not pass the MD5 check. Thought about file transfer over the network but have never tried that before, and didn't want to take the time to learn to do it at that particular time. So I removed the burner from the win 98 machine and hooked it up to the XP machine. I then booted up Slax to memory on it and used k3b to burn a couple of Knoppix DVD's. Worked great. I also burned a DVD with just the ISO file on it. The md5 checked out on this file also. The knoppix dvd seemed to work fine on the xp machine. Removed the burner and put it back in the p3 win 98 system. Booted up the knoppix dvd, worked fine. Rebooted with both Slax and win 98 and the dvd with ISO file passed the md5 check from those systems both times. Used Slax to copy the ISO to each of my 2 hard drives- MD5 does NOT check out on the hard drive copies? I don't know why this is.

My only theories so far is that maybe the bios (1999) is too old to handle these large files, or maybe there's a limitation in the processor somehow. As far as I can tell, my hard drives are OK. Also when I'm running win 98, I can't copy those ISO files, get an error- something like invalid parameter- it can't handle copying that large a file. Knoppix or Slax don't seem to have a problem, though. Shouldn't be the FAT32 system per se, but I just can't get a correct MD5 from a DVD ISO when it's on my hard drives.
Any ideas why this would be? Sorry for the long post, but this has me puzzled.

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I'm not following what is happening here. It sounds like you are saying that you tried to copy the iso onto a DVD so that you could transfer it to another system where you would then burn the iso as an image. If that's the case it should work, but why not just burn the ISO as an image on the first system? I've certainly had my share of bad DVD media lately, the reason for a bad md5 checksum could well be a bad burn or bad dvd used in the transfer. Congratulations on doing the md5 step for confirmation though, a lot of people here would not have done it and would not know where the problem was.

I doubt very much that what you are writing of is a BIOS issue, the BIOS deals with the hard disk at a lower level and should not be involved in any file size issues (and I've never seen any confirmed file size issues due to a BIOS. Partition and hard disk size issues, yes, file size issues, no.)

I regularly set up an FTP server, so using FTP to transfer the files and get past the Win98 file sharing 2 gig limit wasn't a problem for me. But if you don't want to use an FTP server, then I qould suggest splitting the file with a tool like Winrar. While there are some more simple file splitters out there, Winrar gives the extra comfort level of some file checks in the rejoining process. I can't account for why your splitting and rejoining failed though.

By the way, if you use Winrar and let it try to compress the file it will take quite a long time and since the DVD is mostly already compressed it will gain you nothing. Telling Winrar to just split the file but not to try to compress it is the fastest and best way to go in this case.

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Originally Posted by foamrotreturns

I could be totally off base here, but is it possible that the real-time md5 hashing was too much for your Pentium III? Bittorrent actually compares every chunk of the file that it gets to a hash that comes with the chunk. That could be a laborious task for your processor, so I'm thinking that may have been the problem. Regardless, glad you got it working on the AMD machine. Welcome to the Knoppix community!

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Could be, it works the heck out of the system. However I've used it with smaller files and it works fine. I'm wondering if a 3+ GB file is too much for this system or if something else is going wrong somewhere.

Harry, Thanks for the reply. Sorry if I confused you. I'm confused too. Basically I'm trying to figure out why no matter what I try, I can't get a clean copy of the ISO on my hard drive. One that will pass the md5 check. I know from experience that an ISO that doesn't pass the MD5 will be more trouble than it's worth.

In past times I also have had fast downloads with this system, but doesn't seem to work as good as it used to. All I've tried to d/l for quite a while is Knoppix ISO's however. The ports are forwarded, firewall is opened up. Did this on both systems.

Very well could be Azureus is the bottleneck, but it seems it should still write a correct file. Like I said before, I also tried Shadow's BT. I even tried it with Knoppix running Azureus. Used Klik to put it on the system. They were about the same speed. I think for an experiment I will try the original Bittorrent, just to see if it makes a difference. I used it a few times quite a while ago.

And yes, I did copy the ISO to a DVD. The purpose was to try and transfer the file to the other system. The ISO file on the DVD also passes the md5. When copied to my hard drive, however it would not pass the md5. This is what is confusing me.

And I did burn a couple images so I would be sure to have a working DVD. worked great. I just copied the ISO as a test to see if I could copy it to the other system. But it doesn't work for some reason. Tried a couple times, but can't get a correct md5 from the file once it's on the hard drive.

I plan to figure out the file sharing over the network eventually. I agree just from what I've read about it is a local ftp server would be the way to go. I've never tried winrar. The file splitter I used is from here: http://www.dekabyte.com/filesplitter/ . Works pretty slick, but again the resulting file didn't pass the md5.

Anyway I plan to do some more experimentation. I'll go back and give the original BT a try just for a test. At least I have one system that I know will work.

Thanks for the replies, if you think of anything else please post it.

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Originally Posted by xfiles

And yes, I did copy the ISO to a DVD. The purpose was to try and transfer the file to the other system. The ISO file on the DVD also passes the md5. When copied to my hard drive, however it would not pass the md5. This is what is confusing me.

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That sure doesn't make much sense. When you confirmed the md5 of the file that you wrote to the DVD, did you do it on the system that wrote it or the system that you were moving the file to? If the former, it may be that the second DVD drive is having problems reading the disk that it never resolves (although one would expect an error and not a bad file in that case). I would try copying again and rechecking the md5. When it fails again I would look around for one of the utilities that will do a byte by byte file comparison between two files and turn it loose on the ISO on the DVD and the copy on the hard drive to see what is different and where in the file the difference is.

Harry,
It doesn't make sense to me either. I confirmed the md5 of the ISO on the dvd on both systems. Used both a windows md5 checker and the one in k3b. The ISO on the dvd passes with flying colors. Also there is only one DVD drive/burner involved here. I temporarily hooked it to the higher end system once I got a good download there, and the md5 checked out. Then put it back in my lower end system to continue my "testing". The drive seems to work OK in the lower end system, I burned my Slax cd with it. I burned a Knoppix DVD on the lower end system right after I got the drive which didn't work-That's when I started checking the md5 sums and realized something wasn't right. Yes, I admit it, I initially burned before checking the md5. Made a coaster. But as far as burning the dvd, the process seemed to work fine, just like on the higher end system.

I just can't figure out why I can't get a clean copy to the hard drive. If the system has run up against it's limitations, I can accept that. But everything I read and the experience of folks like you suggest otherwise. I'll continue "testing".

Thanks

the problem is the 2Gig sizelimit for one single file of DVD media. it "splits" the *.ISO file when it is copied back...one file again, that is only way i can understand it.

Rsync tended to crash if there was too much other activity on the lan/net.

Contrary to the documentation which says that you can restart rsync and it will resume where it left off, it doesn't. If it restarts at all it clobbers whatever portion of the download that you have.

I was running rsync on my old Debian Sarge system. That's the Sarge from the days when it was still testing rather than stable. So I cranked up my Knoppix 4.02 CD and started the rsync download again. Things went much smoother in that we could do other work on the net without crashing the download. But progress was still painfully slow. After 2 days of downloading I decided to see if restarting would work. So I terminated the job and tried to restart it. Nothing doing. It just kept giving me some meaningless error message and it would stop immediately.

So there I was once again with about 2GB of a 3+GB download. So I found the site ftp.kernel.org which has their own copy of the DVD version, and which is located in California. I cranked up wget -c to continue the download and it worked. It completed the download, appending to what I already had, and in the end the md5 checked out just fine.

Now on to my next problem. I was going to use my wife's new laptop to do the dvd burning. Turns out that it doesn't burn dvd's as I thought but only cd's. So I need to acquire a dvd burner. Any thoughts or suggestions as to which brand/model I should get? I would like to do the burning using k3b under Knoppix 4.02(CD version).