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DISASTER! Help with winrar

Big ClassyBig Classy Registered User regular
So I archived all the family photos in winrar and put them onto a microsd memory card. I checked to see if the archive worked and it did. I then proceeded to format the PC. Now when I attempted to open the archive up I was givenan error saying the archive is either corrupt or in an unknown format. Please tell me I've not lost everything??????? D:D:D:

Big Classy on

Posts

  • undeinPiratundeinPirat Registered User regular
    edited September 2009
    Big Isy wrote: »
    So I archived all the family photos in winrar and put them onto a microsd memory card. I checked to see if the archive worked and it did. I then proceeded to format the PC. Now when I attempted to open the archive up I was givenan error saying the archive is either corrupt or in an unknown format. Please tell me I've not lost everything??????? D:D:D:

    Are you trying to open it with winrar? I'm assuming yes, but just to check.

    undeinPirat on
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  • Big ClassyBig Classy Registered User regular
    edited September 2009
    yeah, I'm using winrar to open it. That's what I used to compress it.

    Big Classy on
  • stigweardstigweard Registered User regular
    edited September 2009
    Did you use the same version for both compress and extract?

    stigweard on
  • Big ClassyBig Classy Registered User regular
    edited September 2009
    i'm not realy sure tbh. Is there any way of finding out?

    Big Classy on
  • stigweardstigweard Registered User regular
    edited September 2009
    Not that I am aware of, but I have run into good archives showing up bad with winrar when the file was compressed with a newer version than what I was running.

    stigweard on
  • Big ClassyBig Classy Registered User regular
    edited September 2009
    well, i'm running the latest version right now so that shouldn't be a problem.

    Big Classy on
  • kralizecckralizecc Registered User regular
    edited September 2009
    Not sure about the particulars, but have you looked into making any parity files? Not sure if you can make them retroactively, or if you can, whether they'd be useful or not.
    I have not ever made any myself, but I've used them to recover corrupt archives, or replace missing pieces.

    kralizecc on
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  • UncleSporkyUncleSporky Registered User regular
    edited September 2009
    Doesn't Winrar have a repair utility/ability? Look around in the options.

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  • RBachRBach Registered User regular
    edited September 2009
    See what happens when you try to open it with something like 7-Zip or IZArc.

    RBach on
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  • Big ClassyBig Classy Registered User regular
    edited September 2009
    Not sure what parity files are so I'll check into that. I've tried the winrar repair function but I get 'Header '???' is unrecognizable' or something to that effect error. And I'm trying the 7-zip thang now. Thanks fellas!

    Big Classy on
  • Big ClassyBig Classy Registered User regular
    edited September 2009
    7zip doesn;t seem to have any effect at all. Tried splitting the archive using that and then attempted to get in but no dice. trying IZarc now....

    ediy: yup, same thing with IZarc. Strange thing is the rar is the proper size and everything, just not recognizable which makes no sense.

    Big Classy on
  • Big ClassyBig Classy Registered User regular
    edited September 2009
    ALright, I;'ve found a number of free data recovery tools and shit but none of them seem to be able to detect my partition. I only have a singl eone so it shouldn't be a problem. Its an NTFS system. Related to the rar issue?

    Big Classy on
  • ArcticMonkeyArcticMonkey Registered User regular
    edited September 2009
    Try to open the the .rar file in notepad or some other plain ascii editor (notepad++ is a great open source tool if the file is to big for notepad).
    'Header '???' is unrecognizable' sounds like maybe your computer reads nothing but zeroes from the SD card.
    If it does read nothing, try reading from another reader, or in another computer.

    ArcticMonkey on
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  • ronyaronya Arrrrrf. the ivory tower's basementRegistered User regular
    edited September 2009
    Yeah, try another computer or reader. Also try copying the compressed file to disc, then opening it in 7z from there.

    ronya on
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  • Big ClassyBig Classy Registered User regular
    edited September 2009
    I've tried it in my laptop and the ssme result is shown. I'm gonna throw it in notepad now and see how that fares.

    Big Classy on
  • wunderbarwunderbar What Have I Done? Registered User regular
    edited September 2009
    Big Isy wrote: »
    ALright, I;'ve found a number of free data recovery tools and shit but none of them seem to be able to detect my partition. I only have a singl eone so it shouldn't be a problem. Its an NTFS system. Related to the rar issue?

    those tools won't help you with a rar file, and it's likely that by re-installing windows you over-wrote most of the pictures that were on the hard drive before.

    If multiple computers and multiple softwares can't open it up, you may be out of luck. Corrupted rar files are pretty hard to recover. I'd start looking into professional services that might be able to recover the file.

    Not to sound insensitive, because if I lost all my pictures I'd be freaking out too, but why did you put all of your pictures into a single rar file, a single point of failure, as a back up. That is just something that is asking for trouble.

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  • kralizecckralizecc Registered User regular
    edited September 2009
    I'm mostly dumb, and ignorant, so take this with a grain of salt.
    When making archives with say, winrar or whatnot, you can use a program such as quickpar to make parity files along with it. These files contain data witch which you can repair or replace damaged or lost archive files.
    You can pars these par files with any of a number of programs, I usualy use quickpar but there are lots out there. I don't know if it works this way, but you may want to look into using one such program and see if you can retroactively make some par2's from your rars, then see if you can repair it with them. I've heard of people doing it, but again, I'm mostly an idiot, I may be thinking of something completely different.

    kralizecc on
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  • Big ClassyBig Classy Registered User regular
    edited September 2009
    tried the cd thing, didn't work.
    Wunderbar, I've never really used rar's before so I was going in blind. That said, I assumed that when I tested it on this machine, it working meant it was fine. Obviously this shows what an idiot i am. You learn from your mistakes I guess? This is painful one however.

    kralizecc, tried quickpar didn't work. I'm pretty convinced this isn't gonna happen, not in this way anyhow. I'm going the data recovery route and I'm gonna see if I can find some good softwaree that'll let me browse files that were overwritten after a format.

    Big Classy on
  • LaCabraLaCabra MelbourneRegistered User regular
    edited September 2009
    GetDataBack has always worked for me.

    LaCabra on
  • Big ClassyBig Classy Registered User regular
    edited September 2009
    Got it in one. Damn. I used EaseUS and fuuuuuuck. I got all sorts of shit. Doesn't seem to name stuff properly though. Still, found the pics. Success! Thanks for all the help guys. 3 days of torment but I got em backc. For the record, they're the only pics we have of our nephew who passed earleir this year, hence the importance of it all. ALso..... I need some freakin sleep.

    Big Classy on
  • electricitylikesmeelectricitylikesme Registered User regular
    edited September 2009
    For future reference you probably want to avoid archiving files you don't have to (compressed jpegs don't compress much further particularly well) and when you are dealing with irreplaceable data back it up onto more then 1 medium.

    EDIT: Also, there's a technique called Reed-Soloman codes which is an error correcting code system that can tolerate losing a fair number of bytes. Google if you're interested or want some good options for the future.

    electricitylikesme on
  • Big ClassyBig Classy Registered User regular
    edited September 2009
    OOOh, sweet. I'll try that out.
    Huge thanks tho all of you fine fellas, I managed to get the stuff back via data recovery stuffs. Downside is that most of the jpegs are unviewable.... something about headers being marked wrong. Tried changing the format to png, tiff, bmp and raw.... that last one yielded some results but the image came out all static like. I'm sure there's a way to fix that but for now, I'm pleased. So once again, thank you so much.

    Big Classy on
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