Official Fedora 37 ISO download corrupted?

Ask Fedora
1

As the title says, I’ve discovered that the official ISO for Fedora 37 downloaded either directly from the site, or downloaded through Fedora Media Writer does not work correctly - The checksum that I get upon booting it up (via the Test & Start option from the GRUB menu) fails at around 4.8% and halts. I have tried everything I could think of, even an entirely new device borrowed from someone else, got the Fedora Media Writer on it, and the installer USB was still broken. (I have also confirmed that the USB flash/thumb drive that I am using is working correctly, it is new and from a trusted company, and has also been used before to install a system successfuly.).

At this point I’m 99% sure it is Fedora’s ISO download fault and not the fault of any of my devices, so to be 100% sure I wanted to ask if anyone else is having a similar experience right now, because it’s either that, or I’ve lost my mind trying to install it for the 92348th time and I’m just doing something wrong? (I also wanted to note that I do have some experience with this distro, not completely new.)

Edit: Currently I am getting; -

Checking: 004.8% The media check is complete, the result is: FAIL.
It is not recommended to use this media.
[FAILED] Failed to start checkisomd50dev-sda.service - Media check on /dev/sda .
dracut-initqueue: Job for checkisomd50dev-sda.service failed because the control process exited
dracut: FATAL: CD check failed!
dracut: Refusing to continue

When I try to reboot but without trying the media check at all and proceed with installation, it goes smoothly for the most part, but when I finish setup and restart, i keep getting notifications about things crashing and the ‘Kernel being modified/broken so I cannot submit a bug report about this issue’ kind of things

2

You can easily repair corrupted images with BitTorrent:

Just specify the target location to the directory with downloaded files.
It should re-download corrupted fragments and fix the images.

You can also verify the images here:

This looks like a local hardware/ISP/mirror-specific problem at most.

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3

Apart from verifying GPG signature and SHA checksum first, wait a bit longer with unplugging after writing an image to the pendrive (a quarter or so) in case it’s caused by caching writes to flash memory.
There were some reports of e.g. windows auto-mounting and modifying partitions after writing them to the memory and causing corruption at certain point (maybe it was at 4,8%), that was also happening on linux, though.

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4

I always download only from the official site (and mirrors) and also always check the checksum on the downloaded ISO before I ever try using it. I use that link above to download the .CHECKSUM file for the iso downloaded then use sha256sum -c <filename>.CHECKSUM to verify the ISO was received intact.

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5

Yeah, I definitely recommend the torrents. Bittorrent has check sums built in. As a bonus, you can help us seed the installation media and help out the next person as well once it downloads :slightly_smiling_face:.

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