Comment 170 for bug 346691

This bug still exists in the 2.6.28-14 amd64 kernel...interestingly, it didn't manifest in my system until I upgraded my RAM from 2GB to 4GB.

My system was down for mobo RMA (bad voltage reg) for the last 3 weeks. Was running fine since Jaunty first went live when I disassembled for RMA, root filesystem on ext3 partition.

The first indication of a problem came after I booted and let the update manager run...installation of the 2.6.28-15 kernel image keeps failing due to corrupted tarfile errors. Repeatedly tried to download it...some succeed but throw corruption error on unpacking, other attempts fail outright with 'package checksum mismatch.' I pulled it down manually via wget (~24MB), but the md5sum didn't match the published value for the package. Then I re-ran it and got a different value! And kept getting different values on subsequent md5sum runs.

My system is dual-boot XP, so I switch to windows and wget the .deb package again onto my NTFS partition. This time, md5sum returns the published value. Reboot using Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid, 32-bit) live CD and mount the NTFS partition read-only. I ran fsck on the ext3 partition, but it aborts as clean...so I force fsck and all checks OK. I run md5sum again on the package, it returns the expected value. I mount the ext3 partition and do a 'cp -av' to copy it to /var/cache/apt/archives for the update manager.

Here's where it gets fun. After the copy, I check the md5sum, and it's wrong. So, I check the md5sum on the original copy of the file on the read-only mounted NTFS partition...it's wrong too! WTF?

I reboot to WinXP and check the md5sum on the packages...the copy on the NTFS partition that was downloaded under XP returns the correct MD5 value, but the copy I made to the ext3 partition under the Intrepid Live CD is wrong. (I mount my ext3 partitions in WinXP using an ext2/3 volume manager) I delete the ext3 copy and use 'copy /b /v' to copy the package again from NTFS to ext3. This time, under WinXP the md5sum returns the correct value for both copies.

SUMMARY:
Problem doesn't seem to manifest until 4G RAM installed
Problem exists in both 32-bit and 64-bit kernels (errors under both Ubuntu 8.10 i386 Live CD and 9.04 AMD64 HDD installation currently on 2.6.28-14 kernel)
Problem DOES NOT manifest under WinXP boot, making it very unlikely hardware is the cause

SYSTEM SPECS:
Asus A8N-E mainboard (nForce4 Ultra)
Opteron 185 CPU (dual-core)
4GB Patriot DDR-400 (PC3200) SDRAM, CAS 2
Maxtor 1TB SATA-II HDD
**p1 = 250GB, NTFS
**p2 = 8GB, ext3
**p3 = 680GB, ext3
**p4 = 2GB, swap