I just downloaded Fedora 10 to my laptop, so that I can burn it to DVD and install it on my home test server later. As it is a large file and I downloaded it on a wireless connection (HSDPA), I wanted to do a checksum check on the file on my laptop, which has Vista installed.

Fedora uses SHA1 for checksums rather than MD5. Vista itself does not have a command to run these checksums on the file, so I needed to find a tool to do it for me. Luckily CentOS provides two such tools here:

CentOS DOS tools

It takes a few seconds to calculate the SHA1 sum of the ~3.5GB Fedora 10 ISO image file, but it is worth doing this check to ensure the downloaded file is valid before trying to make an installation disc.

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Updated 2021 : note that the above post is from 2008, but is left here for archival purposes. I have fixed some of the broken links.