How To Check the Hash?

[abrogard]

I downloaded a file and there's a problem with it. I would like to check the hash but don't know how to do it. What was used to calculate the hash? Can I force utorrent to recheck it after the file is successfully (?) downloaded?

[moogly]

Of course. Stop the torrent job. Right click on it and force re-check.

But bittorrent is a byte-exact protocol and uT discards pieces with hash fail and redwl them.

Data can be corrupted if the initial seeder has uploaded a torrent about data initially corrupted OR if you have an hardware issue (bad sectors on HD, RAM etc...).

[thelittlefire]

... If you're talking about an external hash of the file, I'd recommend http://etree.org/md5com.html

To learn more about BITTORRENT hashes, read up on http://wiki.theory.org/BitTorrentSpecification and the INFO dictionary. That's the hash you see when you select a torrent and look at the General tab.

[abrogard]

Ah, thank you, that's a good trick. I'd never have thought to stop a finished job. Anyway, I did it and it reports no errors.

The torrent has a swag of comments on mininova and everyone says it is fine, it is from a trusted uploader.

I'd suspect a hardware/software fault of my own.

so I used Xilisoft to burn it because Nero kept failing. Xilisoft burned it apparently successfully but when I came to view it the thing stopped before the end. It is incomplete.

I'd guess it reached the place where Nero used to give up. Corrupted file.

But it passes the hashcheck.

Searching for the hash brings up about eight hits, all different torrent places. Sometimes they don't exactly spell the file the same way, one of them even has a word missing from the title, so it's effectively a different title in computerspeak. Does this mean those torrents on those different sites are pointing at different files? So I could try a download from a different site and I'd be downloading a physically different file?

Or are they all pointing at the same file?

I'd use my hashchecker on the file but there's three files in the download and advanced hashchecker only works on one file at a time as best as I can see.

what should I do? Just try another download?

p.s.

thanks littlefire, I'll do the reading.

p.p.s.

am I technically in breach of the rules? Am I 'asking for help on files you've downloaded'

[thelittlefire]

...all torrent sites use the "INFOHASH" which you should read about. When a site has the same INFOHASH it's almost guaranteed to be the same content (barring some cosmic coincidence). You may not see the same data in the index pages, but all filenames should match... that's the basis in the INFO dictionary.

If you've got red parts (Files tab) where are they? If they are at the beginning/end of the files, you need to turn off ALL software which indexes/libraries your data.

[abrogard]

O.K. thanks.