On Mon, Jan 25, 2016, at 11:01 AM, Daniel Kahn Gillmor wrote: > If you're using a GNU/Linux system, /dev/sdX (where X is a lower-case > letter, like /dev/sdb) is the USB disk itself, and /dev/sdXN (where X > is a lower-case letter and N is a number in decimal, like /dev/sdb1) is > the partition.
That is what I meant; the PARTITION of the (USB flash) disk that the Tails ISO was written to, i.e., /dev/sdXN (e.g., /dev/sdb1, /dev/sdc1, etc.) Sorry if I was not clear enough about that. I realized all along that the full device (i.e., full disk) is always larger (and usually much larger) than the ISO and the partition containing the installed ISO (and therefore that the hashes for the full-device will always be different than those for the Tails partition that resides on said device.) For past releases of Tails, the cryptographic checksums (sha256; sha1; md5) for said partition would always match those of the ISO. This allowed me to verify, first, that the write (using dd or cat) had completed without error. Additionally, at any time I wished, I could verify that my Tails partition had not become corrupted by simply generating its hash and then checking that hash against the hash that I knew to be the correct one for the ISO that said partition was written from. (I realize that the second function can still be performed by recording the hash of the Tails partition that was generated immediately after writing said partition to disk and then using said hash as the one to compare against. But since the hash of the partition no longer matches that of the ISO that said partition was written from, I would still be left wondering whether the partition was properly written in the first place AND, even if it was, WHY its hash no longer matches that of the very ISO that it was created from-- as had been the case for me with all past releases of Tails.) Below is the sha256sum I get for the ISO, followed by the one I get for the partition that was written from the ISO. (Note that I verified the ISO against its signature.) sha256sum tails-i386-2.0~rc1.iso 4df44c896a61fc9751463cf3a94d482f1ec0c6d1ae86b270758a2ded544e33d9 tails-i386-2.0~rc1.iso sha256sum /dev/sdX1 3e813eee1d2a38902b31c1180e342237d2c66a36faebe37c065434a10c58fbf0 /dev/sdX1 _______________________________________________ Tails-dev mailing list Tails-dev@boum.org https://mailman.boum.org/listinfo/tails-dev To unsubscribe from this list, send an empty email to tails-dev-unsubscr...@boum.org.