Round 1: MD5 vs. Defective CD drive

About a month ago, I decided to try out SUSE 10.1 on my system. With replacing Slackware 10.2 in mind, I wrote the ISOs on the discs, carefully choosing a minimal writing speed to minimize potential reading errors (8x to be more specific). This was when I noticed something which really weirded me out…

Everytime the tray ejects the disc, 2 (or 3) dead (and burnt) ants are served with the CD. And when the last disc came, well, yeah. A WHOLE ASSLOAD OF DEAD (and burnt) ANTS!

Eh, I exaggerated a bit.

Great. Ants on my CD drive. Whee. Amazing. Not as amazing as when I found out that ants were already colonizing my old keyboard, but still. Not my CD drive! *cry*

Anyway, I proceeded with the installation after the burning process. I decided to check on the integrity of the installation medium just to be sure. *MD5 checksum returns an equal hash* Good. *configures installation* *installs*

I decided to leave it for a while. I came back, food and drink in hand.

“Package blahblah fails integrity check. Would you like to retry downloading the package?”

“Crap. I thought the checksum returned a perfect match? Meh. *presses on ignore* *installation is cut; KDM shows up* What the?!? *repeats whole process*”

I tried it 6 or 7 times, but to no avail. It was after the last try I decided to take a break and save the installation for later.

FAST FORWARD TO TODAY:

A while ago, I decided to clean the CD drive tray.

Great. More ants. Looks like they like living with me, heh.

I also tried to install SUSE 10.1 again, this time I reburnt the CDs on blank media. Same shit.

Okay, so what’s this. A defective download (and possibly a defective MD5 check), or a defective CD drive (VERY much prone to reading errors)? Take your pick.