How to calculate MD5/SHA1/SHA256 checksums of a file without an external tool
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Ok, I've done the required changes... now show me your content!Checksum is the easiest way to check if the content of a file is as it was expected to be or was changed/broken after a file transfer or an internet download.
A lot of websites (like CoolSoft) show the expected MD5/SHA1/SHA256 checksums beside each download link, so users can check "download health" after it completes.
After downloading a file you must calculate its checksum and compare it with the one reported beside the file.
If they are the same (you could also check only the first/last 8 chars) then you can be sure that the downloaded file is not corrupted.
There's a lot of free utilities available to calculate the checksum of a file, and one of them is already bundled in your Windows installation.
Below you'll find my suggestions.
Check with 7-zip
7-Zip is, IMHO, the best free & open source compression utility available on Windows; it can manage the well known .zip and .rar archives, but .7z file format is far better under many aspects.
It also has a great additional feature that allows user to calculate checksum of one or more files, straight from Windows Explorer.
Once installed, right click on a file then select the 7-Zip context menu and finally the CRC SHA submenu.
Select the checksum you'd like to calculate (or * to calculate them all) and a window is shown with the result… easy and clean 😉.
Check with certutil
certutil tool is (should be) already bundled in your Windows installation.
- open Windows Explorer (Win+E) and go to the folder containing the downloaded file
- while pressing the SHIFT key right click on an empty space into the folder
- now choose "Open Powershell window here..." or "Open command prompt here"
- a command prompt will open into the selected folder
- now finally run certutil and make it calculate the required checksum (replace filename.exe with the filename you're going to check):
PS C:\testFolder> certutil -hashfile filename.exe MD5 MD5 hash of filename.exe: 2ffefb74864d962ef9fabde17031a4e7
PS C:\testFolder> certutil -hashfile filename.exe SHA1 SHA1 hash of filename.exe: ade2405a022628835feac342c642a9113f630271
PS C:\testFolder> certutil -hashfile filename.exe SHA256 SHA256 hash of filename.exe: 4cc28a5be8dc7425a4c4fd23a75ca392f18be35d70232e777dce6d9f3b4d79ac
Supported checksums are: MD2, MD4, MD5, SHA1, SHA256, SHA384 and SHA512.
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