RHL Severn - Initial Findings

[Barry K. Nathan]

On Tue, Jul 29, 2003 at 05:26:33PM +0100, Matthew Winter wrote:
> did not show any messages. It said the disks were fine, so I went ahead
> with the install. However when the installer got to disk 2, it would not
> read one of the packages, which meant I had to exit at this point,
> reburn the CD and try again. Luckily it worked OK the second attempt.
> 
> Question : Why did the CD Check say there was nothing wrong with disk 2,
> when clearly there was.

If the CD's marginal, the drive might be able to read the whole thing
through sequentially but later fail to read a file when seeking to it.
I've seen this happen with Knoppix CDs burned onto marginal media (e.g.,
I burn the CD, use readcd or dd to read the whole CD back, notice that
there are no errors, reboot into the CD, and start seeing occasional
I/O errors), so this isn't specific to Red Hat's media check at all.

IME the fix is to use better CDs.

-Barry K. Nathan <barryn at pobox.com>