It turns out that some time ago, Microsoft released a free command line utility called the File Checksum Integrity Verifier for generating MD5 and SHA1 checksums. Best of all, it’s really small (at less than 84 kilobytes) and doesn’t require installation (i.e. can be run from a flash drive).

Microsoft is clear that this is an unsupported utility, but there’s no need for support as it is really easy to use. It will in no way modify your files! To generate MD5 or SHA1 checksums for a file, do the following:

1. Download the fciv.exe file.
2. Open a command line by pressing Windows Key and R at the same time, typing cmd, and pressing Enter.
3. cd into the folder where you downloaded fciv.exe to.
4. To get an MD5 Checksum for a file, type fciv pathToFileYouWantToCheck (refer to this post for an easy way to copy a file path that can then be pasted here)
5. To get an SHA1 Checksum for a file, type fciv pathToFileYouWantToCheck -sha1

Happy Checksuming!