Darth Mallwalker said:

Not long ago when M posted Star Wars Begins to usenet
first thing I did was to download the last RAR (part090) and extract the CRC from its header
because I wanted to check it against the disc JD sent me. It didn't match :(
So does that mean M is a . . . F-word? No, no, no!

Here's a hexadecimal dump from M's image file:

The highlighted parts are the mastering date.

Interesting. I received a physical disc from JD. I used ImgBurn to create an ISO image from the disc. The dump above says that Toast was used to build the ISO, presumably by JD himself. So the original mastering data is present somewhere on the physical disc, and is retained when Imgburn makes the image?

I still have the original image for Pwnage on my hard drive. I also have a disc burned from this image. When I get some minutes spare I'll create an ISO from this disc and try a fc /b on the two images. I can do the same for my original laserdisc transfer, but I know that image was mastered with the old ImgTool Classic so it'll be interesting to see what the differences are.

It should be possible to image a disc and have the image file match. I remember way back in the days of VCD, I managed to create a BIN file from a physical CD which matched the original release (same ed2k hash). Had to recreate the CUE file though.