md5sum repeatedly gives different checksum for same file on same machine

Posted by Joel on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by Joel
Published on 2009-07-07T12:22:01Z Indexed on 2010/06/09 17:42 UTC
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Filed under:

linux

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filesystems

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hard-drive

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hash

I have a very small and quite old hard drive disk, about 32G.
On to this disk I have copied a largish tar file, about 5G.

When I run md5sum to generate a checksum on this file I repeatedly get different results (on the same machine and the same file). This obviously should not happen.

If I repeat the experiment with a much smaller file, as expected the checksum is the same each time. I can only assume that because the large file is spanning most of the disk, and it is an old drive, I am experiencing a lot of read errors on the hard drive - and it needs replacing? Could there be any other good reason for this? Something I can do to fix the problem other than buying a new disk?

Update: sha1sum also produces inconsistent results.

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