Re: [Tails-testers] [Tails-dev] 2.0~rc1: Installed Partition…

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Author: Daniel Kahn Gillmor
Date:  
To: random_user, tails-testers
CC: tails-dev
Subject: Re: [Tails-testers] [Tails-dev] 2.0~rc1: Installed Partition Hash does Not Match Thatof ISO
On Mon 2016-01-25 10:07:06 -0500, random_user@??? wrote:
> - In order to rule-out an error during the writing from ISO to USB
> stick, I repeated the entire process a second time. The result was the
> same: the hashes for /dev/sdX (the partition containing the installed
> ISO) do NOT match the hashes for the ISO


If you're using a GNU/Linux system, /dev/sdX (where X is a lower-case
letter, like /dev/sdb) is the USB disk itself, and /dev/sdXN (where X
is a lower-case letter and N is a number in decimal, like /dev/sdb1) is
the partition. Are you talking about the USB stick itself or about some
partition on the USB stick?

If you're using dd to write the ISO to the USB stick, you'll note that
the iso is a different size from the USB stick's volume:

du -k tails-i386-2.0~beta1.iso
grep sdb /proc/partitions

The chances that two bytestreams of different size have the same
cryptographic digest should be negligibly small, so it makes sense that
the iso and the USB stick have different hashes.

I'm surprised you've ever seen that to be the case.

> - The USB stick that I used for the install is one that I have used many
> times previously, without issue, to install past releases of Tails--
> including 1.8.2


can you repeat the process with the 1.8.2 and verify that they are the
same? Maybe you were comparing something different at the time?

       --dkg