It might be feasible enough to make a cloop filesystem of ~200MB, and just mount it (losetup should be able to), copy the 200MB out and verify it.
If the copy hangs, the cloop module is broken. But as I've said in my previous mail, the broken behaviour is very random and eratic - sometimes it works, other times not. :( Although it seems to hang at the same place with the same iso - if you can create a broken iso with the create_compressed_fs (from cloop-utils) command it might serve as a good testbed.
Jaco
