sjmelia
Group: Members
Posts: 11
Joined: May 2004 |
|
Posted: May 11 2004,14:37 |
|
"In essence, MD5 is a way to verify data integrity, and is much more reliable than checksum and many other commonly used methods." from Unoffical MD5 homepage
Basically, that relatively tiny number is a unique "description" of a file, (in this case the DSL iso) so a program that understands the MD5 code can make sure that every single byte is as it should be. (the file has not been corrupted during the download)
E.g., you don't want to waste a CD by burning a corrupt ISO on to it, so you use the MD5 code to check.
|