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I just tried to set up a VM using VirtualBox and Ubuntu 10.10 desktop edition. Installation proceeded fine, but at ~60-80% I got a message that it failed and it's most likely a defect CD or a read error. So I checked the MD5 sum of the ISO (ubuntu-10.10-desktop-i386.iso) which gave me 5f4ab3c8e40f8dda084213caa842325c, but should be 59d15a16ce90c8ee97fa7c211b7673a8 according to various sources, including the official MD5 site.

I redownloaded and got the same wrong MD5 sum, after that I used the BitTorrent download - still the same wrong sum. All downloads were made from http://www.ubuntu.com/desktop/get-ubuntu/download , I'm trying a third download right now from german CHIP, perhaps this will give the correct MD5 sum (EDIT: No, this even gives another wrong one: 0eb8d63d6eba4710754a36e123b4c4c3).

I tried different MD5 sum checkers (no difference) and googled for the MD5 sum (0 hits). My PC is a netbook with Windows 7 Starter.

Any ideas?

UPDATE: Got the correct MD5 sum now by downloading via BitTorrent again. Memory and HD seem to be OK, thanks for all the help.

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Trying to grab the torrent was a good move. Most BitTorrent clients will let you re-check downloads, which will quickly tell you if your download is corrupted.

Now for the bad news: the fact that you downloaded the ISO file from multiple sources and still ended up with corrupted files points to a possible hardware problem on your netbook (most likely a damaged hard drive controller). To see if this is the case, use another PC to download the same ISO file. Run a hash check on that PC to verify a clean download. Then, copy the ISO over to your netbook and run a hash check again.

Another way of looking for controller problems is to open uTorrent (or your BitTorrent client of choice) and force re-check everything you've downloaded in the last few weeks. If a bunch of your downloads change from 100% done to 99% done (or any similar number), your hard drive controller is at fault.

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  • Accepting this answer, this would've been my next moves (additional, I'll do the memtest Nighthawk suggested). I'll update the question with further results in the next days. – schnaader Feb 13 '11 at 18:49
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You might also want to run memtest86 to verify that your memory isn't bad. It's possible that you've got a few bad spots in RAM that are corrupting your downloads. If you can get a known good copy of an Ubuntu CD, you can boot the netbook off of it and start memtest86 from there. You can also get a standalone version here

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  • Good idea. No CD drive on the netbook, I'll try with an USB stick. – schnaader Feb 13 '11 at 18:47

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