[Pirate07]

This is one of my Linux homework questions this week and I thought the answer was very interesting. I would like to see what the staff and members of PCHELPHQ have to say about it. Here is the question

After downloading a file, you find that it does not match the MD5 checksum provided. Downloading the file again gives you the same incorrect checksum. What have you done wrong and how can you fix it?

[madmatt2006]

it could be a number of things causing it really. even a virus

[madmatt2006]

MMMMmmm....

"MD5 digests have been widely used in the software world to provide some assurance that a transferred file has arrived intact. For example, file servers often provide a pre-computed MD5 checksum for the files, so that a user can compare the checksum of the downloaded file to it"

I guess you could turn off CRC in the file if that's even possible. Is this the sort of answer your looking for? do they give any indication on why it's corrupted?

[Uncle Fester]

Bad RAM is often a cause of checksum errors, but this is a doozy. Could be a download from non-original source (edited package) - what download mehod used - does it say (rpm, apt-get etc).

[Pirate07]

MadMatt is correct, there could be a number of things that could cause this to come back corrupt. However Uncle Fester hit the nail on the head

Quote

Could be a download from non-original source (edited package)

This is the most common reason why an MD5 Sum will come back corrupt. Just because an MD5 Sum comes back corrupt doesn't meant the user did anything wrong.

[madmatt2006]

That question is very misleading and is being asked the wrong way or they don't know English if you read the question the indicated the user has done some thing wrong when in fact the PC could be faulty or a bad link/site. See this bit of the "What have you done wrong" I hope this is not your English teacher

[Pirate07]

madmatt2006, on 05 November 2009 - 09:16 PM, said:

That question is very misleading and is being asked the wrong way or they don't know English if you read the question the indicated the user has done some thing wrong when in fact the PC could be faulty or a bad link/site. See this bit of the "What have you done wrong" I hope this is not your English teacher

LOL!! Yeah this question was not asked very good, and is very misleading. Ironically this question was part of my Linux homework for this week. We kinda had a debate in class today about this, and of course I prevailed and no one in class should get this answer wrong because of what I pointed out. When an MD5 comes back corrupt or it doesn't match up with the original doesn't mean that the user did something wrong. The instructor almost had no choice to agree with me on this one, and there really isn't anything you can do to fix it, other than finding another place to download the program and run the check again.

[madmatt2006]

Great to hear you stuck it to the man!! Good job he can't argue the point