ISO image cd mastering oddities

[Victor Cintron]

I have several ISO image files created on HPUX 11 with mkisofs that are not burning correctly on certain mastering software applications but on others it is ok. These images are installation disks for HPUX 11 and 11i. The md5 of my iso files are the same as the source iso md5.

When an image is burned onto a cd using cdrecord on HPUX 11.0, or Nero on WinXP, the disks give no errors when using swinstall. When the disk is burned using Easy CD Creator, Record Now, or Trace on the PC, there is usually one file(although there are sometimes more) that does not match its correct md5. The CD itself can be read and mounted and all of the other files give correct md5 sums but usually one file is bad. There does not seem to be pattern as to which files get corrupted but alot of the files seem to be related to the /catalog/dfiles directory. Files such as INFO or _BOM and files with extension .cat. There are sometimes other files in random directories. What do these files do anyways that their corruption would cause swinstall not to function?

My main concern is why would certain cd burning applications burn these iso images correctly and others don't. Does it have anything to do with what parameters where specified with mkisofs or could it be the actual source files used to make the image are corrupt from the start and included in the image and then certain applications fix the errors and others don't?

I also used a program called WinISO to open the ISO images. The "bad" ISO images could not be opened completely. It cannot read half of the files in the ISO image but it burns just fine using the correct software.

What could be causing these differences?