Checksum & CD burning

Question

I've had my Mac for 6 months, and it's great. I mainly surf the web, use email and do word processing. There's still so much I don't know about what most other users routinely do on their Macs, I'd appreciate any relevant info regarding my quandary.
I downloaded the TechTool Deluxe upgrade from Apple yesterday, and, as per instructions, burned the disk image to a CD. I used Disk Utility. At one point, I noticed that the indicator showed a verification process going on, whatever that meant.
I'd read in DU's Help that it was a good idea to run a CRC32 checksum on the CD and compare it with a checksum of the original disk image, so I did that. The resulting checksums of the two items bore no relationship whatsoever.
Nevertheless, I opened the fakey little TT Deluxe manual on the CD in Preview, and it looked and printed out just fine. Then I checked the preference settings in Disk Utility (which are still set to the defaults) and noted that "Verify Checksums" and "Skip on Remote Volumes" are both checked.
I should probably use the CD to install TT Deluxe on my hard drive, although I hope I'll never have to use it and I'd prefer to have the bare minimum of non-Apple software on this setup. Does the fact that the two checksums didn't match mean that the CD is useless? And if it is, could that be because "Skip on Remote Volumes" is checked in the DU preferences? (The CD player doesn't seem all that remote to me.)
Should I just try burning the TT Deluxe dmg to a new CD using the Finder instead of Disk Utility, or try it again in DU? It's no big chore, but not knowing exactly what I'm doing makes me feel a little twitchy.
Any advice would be welcomed.

Answer 1

Hi, a brody.
The Apple Care package came with TechTool Deluxe version 3.0.4, dated 2005. However I'd read comments that 3.0.4 wasn't working with later versions of Tiger. Whether that's true or not, I don't know.
The disk image I downloaded from the Apple Support website is version 3.1.1.
I have two more questions.
1. Disk Warrior 3.0.3 has a hardware test. I have that installed on my hard drive, and it seems to run o.k. on OS-X 10.4.8. Do you know whether DW's hardware test would be equivalent to the one in TechTool Deluxe?
2. I clone my Mac HD to an external drive periodically. Do you know if it's possible to run the DW hardware test from the external hard drive to test its own integrity? It's an OWC FW 400+USB2 enclosure with Oxford 911 chipset and 7200 Seagate Barracuda drive. I think DW's hardware test relies on SMART capabilities built into the drive, but don't know if the Seagate would support this. I bought it last July, so it should be of fairly recent manufacture.
(Coming from a PC environment, I hesitate to test-run software that has the potential to make a mess of my system, as Norton Security did.)