ill have to think back to my geek days..
the only experience i have had with linux has been live CD's. i tried about 5 different distro's and ubuntu was the one i liked.
when i finally got ubuntu installed it misread all of my partitions and used both of my hard drives and partitions to install on. i lost all of almost 300gb's of data. be careful when playing around with linux. install it on an older PC first.
as for your checksum error, the only thing i could suggest is using killdisk to completely erase the hard drive and try it then.
if you want a better answere go to the forums at
www.ncix.com and search linux(you might need to make an account, but its worth it.)