Silent errors when reading CDs

Jean-Sebastien Roy js at jeannot.org
Fri Jul 9 08:56:18 PDT 2004


Hi !

I'm currently using FreeBSD 4.10 on an HP D530 SFF.
The system is perfectly stable except for the following problem 
I'm unable to understand :

When I mount a cdrom (mount /cdrom), then calculate the MD5 hash 
of a big file on a CD (md5 /cdrom/bigfile), the results are often random:
unmounting, mounting again and calculating again the MD5 often result in
a different value. What disturb me the most is that absolutely no errors
are reported in any log (no read errors for example).

I thought the CDROM reader, a LITE-ON LTR-48327S PQS3, was the culprit, 
so I replaced it with a PLEXTOR DVDR PX-712A and got the exact same results
(i.e. random MD5 values). I checked the RAM using memtest and got no
errors. The problem does not occur for files on the harddisk.

hw.ata.atapi_dma is set since both drives support it and it seems to be 
required for proper CD/DVD burning. The CD drive is the master on its
own ATA bus.

Could someone provide me a hint on what to check next or how to fix this
problem ?

Thank you very much in advance,

Regards,

Jean-Sebastien



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