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Old August 4th 07, 05:10 AM posted to alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt
Paul
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Posts: 13,364
Default Data corruption in all my downloaded .zip files

wrote:

so what should I do then? wipe my hard drive and start fresh?


Are downloads corrupted from any other sites ? Or only from the
site you mention ?

One way to check for corruption, is to download files where the
sourcing website also includes MD5SUM for each file. That is
a checksum program. If the server with the file on it, has a
checksum next to the download link, a person downloading can
run an MD5SUM program on their downloaded copy, and compare the
checksum.

For example, on this site:

http://mirror.switch.ch/ftp/mirror/knoppix/

the contents of this file:

http://mirror.switch.ch/ftp/mirror/k...-30-DE.iso.md5

contains this one line of text:

77f0fcef3d7b143babc4784f331c63a5 *KNOPPIX_V5.1.0CD-2006-12-30-DE.iso

The hexidecimal string at the left, is the checksum of the file at the right.
This allows a person downloading, to determine immediately whether the file has
been hacked, or is different in some way than the original. If the author of
the file places an MD5SUM on his web site, it also allows mirroring of his
creations, without having to worry about hacking - the user simply checks
the author's web site, to get the magic string that tells you the file is OK.

There are some Nvidia chipsets with built-in Ethernet and some
kind of firewall, that corrupt downloaded packets. What hardware
are you using ? Perhaps you should do some Google checks, based
on the motherboard and its chipset. If you are using a separate
NIC card, then it probably wouldn't be a problem.

Paul