ECTRACT FROM MACINTOUCH.COM
from there Tuesday 23rd edition
Shay Telfer sent us a note about a FireWire data-corruption bug he's
trying to track down:
I've noticed some files being copied incorrectly under Tiger. Here's
the bug report I'm going to file with Apple, let me know if you have
any suggestions.
Summary: Copying or duplicating files > 1GB on external FireWire
drives frequently results in files that are not identical to the
original.
Steps to Reproduce: Choose a file (in this case a 167GB Retrospect
archive, or a 5GB Retrospect archive). 1. Either duplicate the file in
the Finder (via "Duplicate") or using cp on the commandline. The file
can be duplicated to the same drive, or a different FireWire drive. 2.
Use the unix 'cmp' command to compare the two files. Alternatively
generate a checksum of each file using md5 and compare the checksums.
Expected Results: Expect cmp to return no result (i.e. files are
identical). md5 should return identical checksums.
Actual Results: cmp (or md5) returns that the files differ
Regression: This has occured both with an AGP G4 Mac and a Mac Mini,
on two different FireWire drives from two different manufacturers in
two different Firewire enclosures, a Sarotech HardBox Firewire 400, and
a Pleiades Icecube 1394A+B+USB2 enclosure (see below for System
Profiler info).
The hard drives pass SMART tests (where supported) and DiskWarrior.
The RAM in both machines has been checked usign memtestosx.
The problem has not been examined under 10.3. (ie I'm not sure if
it's confined to Tiger).
