Quote Originally Posted by jwb15
I downloaded HashCalc, and you're right it's easy. After going through the steps, and comparing the results with MD5 i downloaded, it is way, way off. Not even close. Now i am 99% percent sure i downloaded the MD5 from the same location i downloaded the ISO. Ahhhh! i hope...

I'm going to try this again, when i get some quiet time, probably late at night. Thanks for all the help!
Because of the way it is calculated, even a single byte or bit difference in a file should cause the md5 checksum to be "way off". The important thing is that it doesn't match. Close does not count.

Manually comparing the checksums is completely valid, but the quickpar techniques that I gave above, md5summer, or most other programs will give you a yes/no type result.
Quote Originally Posted by jwb15
.... Now i am 99% percent sure i downloaded the MD5 from the same location i downloaded the ISO.....
Well, right away that tells me you didn't use BitTorrent. I had about 50% bad downloads from the mirrors before BitTorrent became available. It really shouldn't matter where you got the md5 file from, all mirrors should have the same file, as long as you got the md5 for the same version number and same language (EN or DE) as the ISO. But I expect that you have a bad download. Consider using BitTorrent in the future (see the Downloading FAQ for more details).