I had to recover some files from a messed up hard drive – one of those being my ISO for Visual Studio 2008 as downloaded from Microsoft Volume licensing / Software assurance.

The file is nearly 4-gigs – I didn’t want to re-download, but Microsoft neglected to share any sort of file hash (like they do on technet downloads)

So I started the download using the Download Manager hoping a checksum would be available in the interface. No dice.

After digging around my hard drive, I found the info file for the download manager at:

C:\Users\\AppData\Roaming\Download Manager\blahblah.dmc
It’s your standard microsoft style config with the heading “DLM Recovery Info” (I’d like to point out that this page will soon be the only instance of this phrase on the internets)

And what do you know, it contains a line:
md5=uhuhpt3QyTRBFTr56Tp7Ig==

Now were I more encoding savvy I would have instantly recognized the double equals at the end as a base64 encoded string, but alas, I did not know about this. I converted from base64 -> ascii -> hex, and finally had the good old md5 hash we know and love 🙂

So here it is:

File name: SW_DVD9_Visual_Studio_Pro_2008_English_Core_MLF_X14-26326.ISO
md5 hash: ba1ba1a6ddd0c93441153af9e93a7b22

Maybe there is some other soul out there with a possible corrupt file who can benefit from this hash. Ok probably not, considering VS 2010 is around the corner, and nobody had posted it before.