Me too. I get tons of them, but everything still seems okay.
This is with a 53000bps USR x2 V.Everything Courier modem.
> > ....
> > > After the reboot and fsck, the communicator tarball was corrupted again
> >
> > Mmm.. filesystem corruption could have caused the second failure,
> > or maybe something flakey in the I/O cabling or PIO settings.. ??
> > ....
>
> Yes. This seems to be an option (I'm PIO 3 because PIO 4 caused me
> problems. I have a tower so I suspect the cables are too long) but ...
>
> > > Then I tried to
> > >
> > > tar cfv /u/tarball.tar /usr/src/linux/
> > > cp /u/tarball.tar /u2/
> > > diff /u/tarball.tar /u2/tarball.tar
> > >
> > > and no diffs.
> >
> > Note: The diff is probably just diff'ing from memory,
> > regardless of what actually got written to the drive.
>
> No, I don't think so.
>
> I have only 32 Mb of RAM and the kernel was compiled, with all .o, .a and
> intermediate kernel images. Result of 'du -s': 42933, much more than my
> total RAM.
>
> >
> > > dd if=/dev/zero of=/u2/a1 bs=1048576 count=40
> > > cp /u2/a1 /u/
> > > diff /u/a1 /u2/a1
> > >
> > > and no diffs.
> >
> > Ditto, unless you have less than 40Meg memory.
> > For this type of test, reboot before doing the diff
> > if you want to *really* test things.
>
> No. I was careful to create a file bigger than my real memory.
>
> >
> > > kernel hdx msgs:
> > >
> > > hda: QUANTUM LPS270A, ATA DISK drive
> > > hdb: ST51080A, ATA DISK drive
> > > hdc: ST32132A, ATA DISK drive
> > > hdd: LTN106A, ATAPI CDROM drive
> >
> > If it still corrupts when copied to disk, try copying it around
> > a few times, and then reboot before doing a "diff".
>
> Okay. Yesterday evening, I retried the installation of communicator. I
> have found that the corruption problem was highly reproducible (on my
> machine, of course).
>
> I just have to
>
> 'split -b 100k communicator-v402b7-export.x86-unknown-linux2.0.tar.gz'
>
> re-download the corrupted chunks (xbt and xcn) and then, when it was time
> to 'cat x* > communicator.tar.gz', the xbt and/or xcn was corrupted again.
> No matter if I 'cp xbt xbt.saved' before catting, the xbt.saved in the
> long run become corrupted too. I have saved all the correct files in a
> different partition. The corruption reached these files too (only xbt and
> xcn).
>
> Ah, and just for the courios, to decide if a file was corrupted or not
> I've used md5sum.
>
> I'm starting to think that my linux box don't really like this version of
> communicator :)
>
> Ciao,
> Riccardo.
-- mlord@pobox.com The Linux IDE guy