[Sussex] Testing Kit ???

[John D.]

During my recent "adventures", I've had to "try" to burn discs for both 
Knoppix and Gentoo, but for reasons that I don't follow i.e. all the 
md5sums showed the downloads as OK, the burned copies seem to have had 
"faults"

While I meddled with the installing of the knoppix to my hard drive, it 
showed up I/O errors, that weren't exhaustive, but enough to seemingly 
cause a few post install problems.

The gentoo universal disc only got part of the way through the boot 
sequence (to quite an early stage), before it seemed to give up the 
ghost. So I was wondering if there was any particular way of checking 
the device - it hasn't done a great deal of work, but of course, that 
shouldn't preclude the possibility of some sort of physical malfunction.

I don't have enough kit to physically check the device, and wondered if 
anyone knew of any way of checking it - software ???? Or if I should 
just get a new one and replace ??

regards

John D.