How to Check Windows 10 ISO File Integrity

Last night I downloaded the Windows 10 ISO from Microsoft Techbench web site more than three times, but the downloaded ISO file failed to work with Rufus to create a bootable USB disk for installing Windows. Every time, Rufus stopped in the middle when it came to extracting “install.wim” file from the ISO image. So finally I got tired and went to sleep. In the morning I had an epiphany and thought of checking the file hashes of the downloaded ISO files to see whether they were corrupt. My suspicions turned out to be true and the file hashes did not match the ones posted by various people in different online forums.

If you also have been facing a similar problem with the Windows ISO images, then the first thing you should do is check the file integrity of the downloaded ISO file. You can use HashTab to calculate the file hashes of the ISO image. Or you can use our own lightweight file hash checker utility Hash It. You have to look for the SHA-1 file hash in either of these tools. Since the Windows 10 ISO is a little bit more than 4GB in size, it might take about a minute or more to calculate the SHA1 hash for the ISO file.

Check Windows 10 ISO Integrity

Now the question comes where to find the file hashes to compare with? Fortunately, some people have already calculated and posted the file hashes for all the different versions of Windows 10 ISO and all you have to do is search for them using Google. Basically, you can search for the file name for the ISO (for example, Win10_1511_1_SingleLang_English_x64.iso) and it will show you search results with file hashes. Then you can compare these file hashes with your own. If there is no match, possibility is that your file is corrupt, but you can still try to use the ISO file. It might still work.

Check Windows 10 ISO Integrity

Conclusion: Windows 10 ISO images are available from Microsoft servers, but because of their large size they could become corrupt during the download. You can compare the file hashes of the downloaded ISO images to see if they are corrupt or confirm to the file integrity checks.

4 comments

  1. I just downloaded Win10_1803_EnglishInternational_x64.iso and arrived here via google searches for a hash of the iso.

    It’s poor form that microsoft doesn’t provide hashes for their iso files. I would much prefer to get one from microsoft, rather than a hash from a random google search. This is really poor from a tech company.

    The pastebin links in this article are not being updated with new iso’s that are being released. This would all be solved if Microsoft provided them in an easy and accessible manner.

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