akonstam@trinity.edu wrote:
On Fri, Nov 12, 2004 at 10:12:17PM -0500, Erik Hemdal wrote:
  
md5sum -c MD5SUM

I've already indicated this once. After successful MD5SUM check - boot
with 'linux ide=nodma' and then do the MediaCheck.)
          
I think this comment was from Satish about ide=nodma.  Why is that
necessary?  I've encountered the mediacheck failures similarly for the
first time ever.  If the drive operates normally, why do we need nodma
in order to check only disk2 and disk3 of the CD set?  

I'm not intending this as disrespectful to anyone; I'm truly curious
about it.  Out of the four install images, all four pass the MD5
checksum test, and two out of four pass the mediacheck.  On my CD
writer, cdrecord reports that the buffer was always adequately filled
and burnfree protection was never needed.  So assuming the integrity of
the media is OK (seems to be, since cdrecord reports no errors and the
CD is readable), I'd suspect a problem with the original ISO image. 
Whether you use DMA or not on your drive doesn't seem to have any
bearing on things....else other I/O would have trouble too.

Am I missing something?  

Erik

    
I don't know what you are missing but with some hardware the ide=nodma
is necessary for to mediacheck to work and the installation from CD's
to work without getting read errors.
  
I encountered the nodma issue when i was upgrading to FC3 last year as well. For some time i thought that nodma might be needed on all read operations on such hardware, but i'm no longer sure that's the case. There might be a corrrelation though between this issue and the fact that Linux media players crash on me on one out of about 8 or 10 DVDs. Might suggest that there's something wrong with the driver causing both issues.