How to check md5 hash of a downloaded file

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Related Hot Network Questions. Question feed. Stack Overflow works best with JavaScript enabled. I highly recommend reading this article to find the best apps I recommend if you are on Windows there are even a few for Android users. If the downloaded file comes with a MD5 file, you can open it on Windows with any text editor. Double-click on the file and choose an app in the suggested list Notepad, for example.

Now, you can use Get-FileHash in Powershell or any other tool of your choice to generate the checksum corresponding to the download file an ISO file for example , and compare it to the MD5 indicated in the MD5 file. To translate this article, select a language. View Original Translate. English Original X. View Original X. By: Support. Support 0 contributions. Issue: You would like to verify the integrity of your downloaded files.

If you have copied the file to your desktop as I suggested, type " cd desktop " without the quotation marks and hit the ENTER key.

Otherwise, change directory by typing " cd " followed by the full path. If the previous sentence does not make sense to you because it is filled with technical lingo , type " cd desktop " without the quotation marks, and followed by the ENTER key to go to your desktop, and copy your file to your desktop as I mentioned in the first step. You can verify that your file is indeed in your new location by typing " dir " without the quotation marks , followed by the ENTER key.

This will list all the files and folders in that directory. Change " filename. This must be the full filename, including the suffix or extension. Note that you may not be able to see the real full filename in Windows Explorer or your desktop, since Windows hides it by default. If so, either force Windows to show the full name, complete with file extension , or find out the name from the "dir" listing you did above. Enclose the name inside double quotation marks, especially if your filename contains spaces.

If you are not sure, just enclose it inside double quotation marks anyway. It will do no harm. The program certutil will print the results on the screen when it has finished processing the file. If your file is very big, and your hard disk is slow, it may take some time to run, since it has to read every single byte of the file. Compare the results with your source. Remember to compare the file size too.

You can quickly get the file size from the command line since you are already there , by typing the following after substituting your actual file name in place of "filename. This gives you the actual file size in bytes, instead of the rounded up number you see in a typical Windows Explorer window. Alternatively, you can also close it by clicking the "X" button on the top right corner of the window. All rights reserved.