Many of us experienced installation failure when we tried to install Microsoft software packages extracted from the ISO image. An ISO file is an image of a CD/DVD. In other words, an ISO image is an archive file of an optical disc, a type of disk image composed of the data contents from every written sector on an optical disc file system. The ISO image file usually has a file extension called .iso. Usually, Microsoft published their software in ISO images that can be easily downloaded and copied to CD/DVD. In this article, learn how effectively use Microsoft File Checksum Integrity Verifier tool to verify ISO (.iso) images downloaded from the internet.
When you download an ISO image from the Microsoft download center or subscription account, the ISO file may get corrupt once the download is completed. The corruption is quite possible, especially for large .iso images of more than 1.GB of file size. This may be due to low internet download speed or frequent internet disconnection while the .iso file download is in progress. Further, if you try to install software using such a corrupted .iso image, then the installation may not be initiated nor successful. Similar problem occurred when installing Visual Studio 2010 SP1 package. Now, the question is how to make sure that the downloaded .iso image file is correct. In such cases, we need to have some verification tool that does the checksum computation. The Microsoft File Checksum Integrity Verifier is a command-line utility tool for computing the hash (checksum) of files.
Download location:
The File Checksum Integrity Verifier can be downloaded from the Microsoft website. Download here
Installation:
Platform: Windows
Double Click on windows-kb841290-x86-enu.exe installer file to install the utility. Further, the installer will ask for the target folder to extract the File Checksum Integrity Verifier utility. Enter the location of your choice and click on OK button to extract the files.
The target folder contains following files.– Fciv.exe
– Readme.txt
Using File Checksum Integrity Verifier utility:
fciv d:\downloads\vs2010SP1dvd1.iso
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The checksum computation takes a couple of minutes based on the .iso image size. Once the calculation is done, you can see the calculated checksum or SHA1 hash on the command prompt.
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Now verify the computed checksum against the one which is mentioned in the installation location. If there any difference you see, it is clear that the downloaded ISO image is corrupted, and you may need to download it once again.
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