Darik's Boot and Nuke (a.k.a. "DBAN" does do its job properly of securely erasing your hdd IF you are aware of some significant glitches when you read the final report. The main frustration and irritation I had with it were the four "non-fatal" error messages that were flagging /dev/sdb ... sde devices. Why the author of such a program that has been around for years doesn't make this known to users is puzzling to me. Many users of DBAN have had to go through the same nonsense of literally unplugging devices like card readers, usb ports, second hdd's, dvd +/- players, and so on. IMHO, totally unnecessary and a real pain. Save yourselves a lot of time, confusion, and frustraion by ponying up and paying for one of several superior programs for wiping your hard drive clean.

I would like to download Linux Mint 16 Cinammon version and a "lightweight" disro like Puppy or Zorin. From the reading I've done regarding downloading and burning .iso files from online sources, most people have the opinion that it's mandatory and not optional to run a checksum integrity program to verify a "clean" download before the .iso file is burnt to a disc (my preferred method). I know this site recommends the cur prompt or command from a terminal window. It's just that I am trying to use the "rhash" urility instead. Have any of you used this instead of the curl command? If so, I know there are help/manual pages, but I've had every single term I type in for a man page rejected. Getting the proper checksum isn't the problem for me - it's knowing how to enter it correctly so I can see if my downloaded .iso file matches it exactly in the rhash window. Thank you for all your cooperation and help that you've been so generous with!

You can use 'rhash -c' on the image.iso.sha

Sorry, but I think I understand how to use the Terminal window/console fairly well with at least some of the most useful commands. So, it isn't a puzzle or mystery to me to know how to enter 'rhash -c' into the terminal window at the prompt. However, I'm not sure what you mean by using this command line entry on the image.iso.sha means. Could you give me a more specific or detailed example, please? As usual, my mind gets frustrated and confused too fast because it has a bad habit of taking every word/sentence people tell me literally. Thank you.

Ok, so lets say you download 64-bit Linux Mint. You then download the checksums file:
http://ftp.is.co.za/mirror/linuxmint.../sha256sum.txt
Many distros have separate checksum files that are specific to the iso that you download, while Mint has all the checksums in one file.

So after you download the linuxmint-16-kde-dvd-64bit.iso and the sha256sum.txt into the same directory, then you can open a terminal at that location, and run 'rhash -c sha256sum.txt' and that will check all the checksums listed in the file against the iso if it exists. You can also do the same using 'sha256sum -c sha256sum.txt', and most checksum programs use the '-c' option to check checksums.

Another way you could do it is just run 'rhash linuxmint-16-kde-dvd-64bit.iso' and check the checksum yourself, visually with the listed one.

If this is not the answer you wanted, then please provide a concrete example of what is needed.