Quote Originally Posted by Taeke
The sytem is booting up OK now. However, there seem to be many read/write errors on the CD. I tried to check the downloaded ISO file against md5sum under Knoppix. This was not succesful. May be too many errors in the download. .
I would not try to check the MD5 under Knoppix (I didn't even realize we had a MD5 tool in Knoppix, although it figures that we would). I would check it before you burn, under Windows. There are plenty of md5 tools available that run under Windows, Google is your friend. I'm currently using the one from toast442.org. It's not perfect (it seems to hang while it calculates md5 sums with no clue that it's really working, and it will not accept an md5 file as input while it starts (open with ...) although it will let you drag and drop an md5 onto it once it has already started. Still, it and several others do the job.

If you have a bad file I would bet money that you would find two things if you investigate closely: First that the file is somewhat larger than the size it should have been. Second that if you get a good copy of the file and byte by byte find the differences that you will see that Linux "newline" bytes have been replaced by MS CR/LF pairs. This is a translation that in intended to happen for text files, but should not happen for binary files. At least half of my Knoppix downloads have been bad this way. I've never had this happen with any other binary files I've downloaded from the Internet (and that's many), just Knoppix. I don't know any good fix except to try different servers and note where you got a good download from(I don't consider translating backwards reasonable). Next time a version is released I'll be using the BitTorrent download to avoid this issue.

I've also seen reports that some people write the iso at their full burner speed, even when they know the media isn't rated for it. I've seen too many problems when I write a CD at 48x or more. Yea, it should work, but I know I'm going to be punished for it. I write mine at 4x (even on 52x media) and as long as the md5 sum is good I've had no other problems. I can wait the 15-20 minutes, and can even use the computer to do other things while I'm waiting (although I avoid the intensive FPS games at that point).

I'm curious how you know/why you said "However, there seem to be many read/write errors on the CD.. Are there actual errors coming back from the CD (which would imply a bad burn) or are things just not working (which would imply the iso was corrupt)?

So if the md5 sum is bad, don't even bother to burn it, get a good copy (try BitTorrent). If it's good then try burning a copy nice and slow, at least for your first time.