I'm publishing a set of documentation to be delivered on CD. My Company's European production manager is concerned that he has no way to verify that the data on the discs he produces is correct. He asked that either I send him a CD to compare to, or he sends me a disc and I do the first article inspection. This would negate all the advantages of sending the ISO file instead of the physical CD.
My first thought is to use md5 hashes. I could take the sum of the ISO I created, and he can compare the sum of his copy of the ISO, and to the physical disc.
However, I can't seem to figure out how to get the md5sums utility to hash the disc as a whole rather than reporting the sums of each file on the disc. Then, should I even expect the sum of the ISO to match the sum of the disc's contents?
The solution I come up with must work on both Windows XP and Windows 7.
32 Answers
Corz's checksum
Best utility I've used for checksums, IMO. It will checksum a whole disk like you ask, unlike other incompetent programs. . .
edit:
In case you aren't reading the comments, there was a question about creating an aggregated hash of an entire folder tree. I've only used two checksum programs. MD5deep and Corz's checksum. So the only program that I know of that will create an aggregated hash of a folder tree is Corz's checksum, which is linked in my answer.
9You can use dd for Windows to extract an iso from the CD, and then run md5sum on the retrieved image.
