On Saturday, December 7, 2019 at 4:06:57 PM UTC-8,
et...@whidbey.com wrote:
> On Sat, 7 Dec 2019 15:21:37 -0800 (PST), whit3rd <
whi...@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >You might want to consider reading the originals several times, and
> >check for differences (MD5 checksum would work, diff will give more detail),
> >to detecf soft failure.
> I'm not sure how to check one read from another.
> Do you have any suggestions? Is MD5 checksum a program I can
> download?
The usual programmer software (last one I used supported Motorola S-format but
decades pass) can make a binary or hexadecimal dump file, with
no extraneous info (date/time, for instance). It's a nuisance to proofread one such
file against another, so one would make a checksum; the MD5 algorithm can
hash large files down to 128 bits, and match of such hashes implies
bit-by-bit match of files, or even directories of files. There's lots of utilities that
can do such a hash, I've found 'em for Windows.
The 'verify' function tests a programmed unit against a file. What I was
suggesting, was comparison of twenty dumps from the elderly unit
against each other, to see if there were 'weak' bits.
The reason to retain twenty copies, is to pick the most-likely-to-be-correct
bit values if there IS a difference found, and the verify might not give enough
detail in its report. A checksum that's the same 17 times in 20 is probably
indicative of the 'right' data.