If the SHA-256 hash agrees, the file did not sustain any damage in transit. It does not matter how unreliable your connection is. If the file seen any unintentional, random changes, SHA-256 would not agree. The same holds for SHA-1, which is checked by torrent clients.⁽¹⁾ Your file is not damaged. Hypothetically you may be falling victim to a malicious agent, but the picture I see does not put this scenario among most likely explanations of your trouble. I absolutely support you wish to do proper security, but I believe this will not lead to overcoming the problem. To resolve the issue, we need to know, what exactly happens and where. What command do you execute, at which stage of the installation (please refer to the specific part of the Arch Wiki), what are the errors? “failure to install with all manner of python errors before I tried to get the signature and verify the disk” is not only letting us understand, what is happening. It is making things confusing, because signature verification is done before Arch ISO is even used. As for errors from `gpg --verify`: is this the actual, exact error message gpg printed? If not, in future please do not paraphrase errors: it really makes helping harder. I guess you might’ve received an error about gpg not being able to open the signature file. Does the file exist? ____ ⁽¹⁾ Based on documentation, aria2 seems to disable integrity checks by default. I was not aware of this before and imagine astonishment on my face. But this does not apply to your case, because of the `-V` option.