Quote Originally Posted by Quinny
..... I hadn't checked the MD5, (but I was confident in my download (never had a problem with cuteFTP in years!) When I then checked it, it was OK anyway!
I'm glad your md5 sum checked (assuming you checked it properly). But there is good resaon that we stress to new users to check it. I've never had a known bad download of any other file by FTP or HTTP either, but about 50% of the ISO files for Knoppix that I have downloaded from the mirrors have had bad md5 checksums. I've put some time into determining why this is, and I've determined, by binary editing of a good ISO and a corrupt ISO side by side, that sometimes the FTP transfer happend as a text transfer instead of a binary transfer. This "feature" of FTP replaces the bytes that look like Linux new line characters with the byte pairs that look like Microsoft cariage return / line feed characters. Good for text file transfers, will ruin your binary download.

I don't know why it's happening for me. I have my FTP client set up to force a binary transfer, not to "automatic". But still I would download for hours and frequently get a bad download. I can only guess that some setting is wrong on the mirrors that lets this happen. Obviously it only happens when you download to a Windows system, not when you download to another Linux system. I now use BitTorrent, which is faster, has built in error checking, and does not suffer this problem.

So rather than get into discussions with several users a day about FTP transfers that translate between different ascii formats, we tell users that it is important to check the md5 sum, which will catch this problem and any others. What I dont understand is why people like you ask for help but then will not make the check.


I'm glad that you have a good ISO. I don't know why you are having boot problems. Have you followed all of the instructions in the downloading faq? Have you tried the testcd feature at boot time? Have you tried using any cheat codes? My experience is very different than yours, the Knoppix CDs that I have burnt boot on every single computer I've even tried them on. Sometimes old memory starved 486s boot too slow to really be useful. Sometimes there are things like an old sound card that don't get recognized. Sometimes I've needed cheat codes (nodma on one system with versions 3.4 to 3.7; noscsi and acpi=off on another system for the same version range). But my CDs always boot on about 6 systems I have used them on here and on at least eight or nine systems of friends that I have given CDs to.