Problems with Knoppix

[Dale Farnsworth]

In article <200704071553.04064.mark at phillipsmarketing.biz> you write:
> I boot my laptop with the latest Knoppix v 5.1 CD. I then open a root 
> terminal. I type
> 
> md5sum  /dev/hda
> 
> wait........
> 
> and get a number. I then repeat the experiment, and get a different number!
> 
> I have not mounted nor touched the local drive hda.
> 
> I tried this at runlevel 5 using the cheat code nofstab, and at runlevel 3. 
> Same results.
> 
> Is this normal? 
> 
> I wanted to copy an image of my hard drive to another disk. I did that, but 
> cannot get a consistent md5sum for the local drive to compare to the image I 
> copied to another drive. I wanted to compare the 2 md5sums to insure I have a 
> complete copy of the disk image before I reformat the drive for another 
> project.

Do you have a swap partition on hda?
(Check the output of "fdisk -l /dev/hda".) If knoppix finds
a swap partition on the local disk, it will use it by default,
which would change the md5sum of /dev/hda.

You could try booting knoppix with the noswap option.
Type "knoppix noswap" at the Boot: prompt.

-Dale Farnsworth