If you happen to be one of those people who burn lot of iso's like we do through our RequestCD program then you would most probably have come across the dreaded checksum errors or md5sum errors. We used to get a lot of these and interestingly we found that we get consistent md5 checksum errors with certain iso images. We were almost sure that this had nothing to do with actual burning errors since they happened only for certain iso images. After hours of scouring the internet we found out the real culprit behind these errors and a way to really work around these phony error messages and actually verify if the iso was written correctly. We burn using either Brasero or K3B but this information can be applied to other cd/dvd burning software as well.
md5 Checksum
We have been running the RequestCD Program for more than a year now. For this program we have been heavily downloading iso's, mostly GNU/Linux distributions. We download either through direct downloads or through bittorrent. Bittorrent downloads are inherently safer because the downloaded iso would be guaranteed error free. However http and ftp downloads results in corrupted downloads once in a while. Traditionally when you end up with a corrupted iso you had to download the iso file again. Not anymore. You can easily repair a corrupted iso using Bittorrent.