Booting shipped live CDs?

[postmast3r]

On 6/20/05, Matt Galvin <matt.t.galvin at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I just got my free shipment of Ubuntu CDs.  Unfortunately, NONE of the
> > live CDs that were shipped can successfully boot and get stuck at
> > "Retrieving casper" (the part immediately after I choose my language).
> > After half a minute of funny noises coming from my drive while at
> > that stage, I am told there is a read error and to retry.  So, I
> > retried...10 times and it never gets past that stage.  I see no
> > visible scratches or anything on any of the CDs yet they all fail at
> > exactly the same spot when booted.
> 
> > I had no problems booting Ubuntu's live CD that I downloaded straight
> > from www.ubuntu.com and burned myself onto a CDR.
> 
> > Did anyone else have this same problem with their shipped live CDs?
> 
> Yes, none of my live CD's work either :(
> 
> Matt
> 

What is also interesting is, the md5sums of every single Ubuntu 5.04
Live CD I got does not match the md5 sums at:
http://us.releases.ubuntu.com/releases/5.04/MD5SUMS

Here are the md5sums for each of the live CDs I could not boot:
d9fd22fbd6510b5903789993e090f406  cd1.iso
d9fd22fbd6510b5903789993e090f406  cd2.iso
d9fd22fbd6510b5903789993e090f406  cd3.iso

The md5sum of the live CD I personally downloaded from www.ubuntu.com is:
77a1a8be45e0cc93a14c9b9bf00f6648  ubuntu-5.04-live-i386.iso
which matches the md5sum listed on the site.

Also, the live CDs that failed to boot are 307200 bytes larger in
their ISO than the one I downloaded.  655566848 bytes for the live CDs
I got shipped, 655259648 bytes for the live CD I downloaded.

I also did "md5sum -c md5sum.txt" from one of the Live CDs I got
shipped and none of the md5sums failed to verify except for one file:

$ md5sum -c md5sum.txt
md5sum: can't open ./install/netboot/pxelinux.cfg/default
md5sum: MD5 check failed for './install/netboot/pxelinux.0'

But I am not sure if that would cause the retrieving casper stage to fail.