Check startup flash drive for integrity?

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Cyberhawk

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Joined: 07/27/2010

Hello everyone!

I'm trying to install Triskel 9.0 on my main laptop, a RYF lenovo X200s. After downloading the image, running md5-checksum check on the .iso file and writing it per dd to my usb-drive, I face the following issue:

the installer is crashing on me. Twice, right at the end. It told me to try and clean the DVD I've been installing from, or check if my hard-drive is too old, or move the laptop to a cooler environment.

I presume the flash-drive has bad data on it. It does work for booting the machine into a Triskel desktop. But installation fails unfortunately. Now all my data is safe, /home never got formatted during my installation attempts. All I need to do is just find another flash-drive and use that.

But here is my question. Is it possible to check the integrity of the data on a flash-drive, similar to how we run a md5-checksum check on the .iso? And if so, should this not be part of the documentation for installing trisquel?

Cyberhawk

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Joined: 07/27/2010

Created a new startup-drive, installation succeeded. Now trying to run fsck from within the newly installed triskel. Here is what happened in terminal:


sudo fsck /dev/sdc1
fsck von util-linux 2.31.1

no further output. Does that mean the flash-drive has been tested successfully and contains no errors? This is strange, both flash-drives produce same output from fsck. But one of them installs successfully, the other one crashes the installer in the end.

Cyberhawk

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echo $? always yields a 0, with both flash drives. Filesystem-wise both seem to be perfectly fine. However, it seems there was a solution to my problem hiding in plain sight. After mounting the faulty flash-drive, and cd-ing into it, I ran:


md5sum -c md5sum.txt

And what do you know? casper/filesystem.squashfs failed the check. On the other flash-drive everything checks fine. I could have known from the beginning, that this one drive was faulty...

I was not aware of this md5sum.txt file before. Running md5sum -c on it seems like a very sensible thing to do before starting the installation!