Setting up USB for Distro’s and trying to verify Linux Mint on Windows as per the instructions on the Mint site (following the video’s in LMS ) and I keep getting CertUtil: Too many arguments
expected no more than 2 but got 5
Tried this a number of times, even redownloaded. Still no go.
Hopefully someone has an idea of why it won’t verify the iso.
In the meantime I am going to try Ubunto. 
ChicaChoice,
Have you verified the SHA256 checksum values to make sure your iso download was as it should be and nothing was lost on the transfer? Let me know if you need instructions on how to do this if you didn’t.
By all means try out Ubuntu and even a few others and see which one you like the best. Vasileios favors Zorin as you can easily customize the look as a Mac or windows desktop for beginners.
Michael
Michael,
Yes please. The very first time I downloaded a distro (I think it was Mint Cinnamon) I tried to follow the instructions. It took me forever, with a lot of duckducking, back and forth on different sites, downloading from different mirrors until eventually I got confirmation that I had a good copy. I have been checking out a bunch of other distros on some old laptops I dug out of the basement. Haven’t bothered to verify any of them because of my first go round.
John
Exactly @mva that is what I was attempting to do - verify the SHA256 values.
Downloaded from any number of the mirrors and followed the instructions to verify however none of them verified.
So I gave up and went with Ubuntu
John,
Usually there should be a checksum value accompanying the download file. On the website where you download your mint .iso file, there will be a file to download containing the checksum values for your flavors (sha256sum.txt)
If you downloaded the cinnamon version the checksum will look like this:
50b833f1f093c029bfb7ba6148c9ce96619c01a83e92f35287983fbd62f26b01 *linuxmint-20.2-cinnamon-64bit.iso
Depending on what OS you are using for your download issue the proper command on your downloaded file which will then generate its own checksum value. If they match, then you know your file is valid.
Linux:
sha256sum /path/to/file
MAC:
shasum -a 256 /path/to/file
Windows:
CMD
CertUtil -hashfile C:\path\to\file SHA256
Powershell
Get-FileHash C:\path\to\file -Algorithm SHA256
@mva Michael,
You little ripper mate. Used CMD in Windoze. 1st try came up with a syntax error (too many arguments). It did not like the fact that I had spaces in my Folders/File names. Once I got rid of those it worked just fine.
That was much easier than the convoluted method off their site here:
https://linuxmint-installation-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/verify.html
and here:
https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=42&t=291093
Thank you so very much,
Merry Christmas,
John