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What exactly is the difference between an md5 and an iso. disadvantages and advantages of both?

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Md5 is a hash - iso is a disk image. – Rich Bradshaw Feb 26 '10 at 23:59
An MD5 file is about 1KB and an ISO is about 700MB. – Iain Feb 27 '10 at 0:31
Just imagine if we could reverse an md5, eh? :P – Phoshi Feb 27 '10 at 0:37
@Phoshi: i'm not downloading that movie, i'm decompressing this hash. – Ian Boyd Feb 27 '10 at 2:37
wonderful... sounds like I can "calculate" the ISO when I'm given only the MD5 – netvope Apr 1 '10 at 20:59
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An MD5 is an 128bit hash value (such as 49f68a5c8493ec2c0bf489821c21fc3b), wheras an ISO file is a "disk image" - effectively a file containing the same data as a physical disk would. You're comparing the sticker on an apple to an orange, here - the two are not related. You may find ISO files that come with an MD5, as each file has a unique hash (Well, unique enough that it can be used for verification), and so a corrupt download (or one tampered with, for example to insert nasty viruses) will not return the same hash as the original file.

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When you download disk images like iso there is *.md5 included !

The md5 is a hash of the related iso in order to verify its integrity ! So when you download a disk image you compute $ md5 image.iso and compair what you get with the given md5 hash ! If they match then your diskimage don't have any errors !

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You're the William Shatner of exclamation points. – ceejayoz Feb 27 '10 at 2:48
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