Is it possible to recover an incomplete RAR archive download?

[ranger]

I was downloading a rather big rar archive file. It was about 93% finished, but I really had to leave so I canceled the download. I can open the incomplete download and see the contents of it from winrar. But when I try to open a single file, I get an error message saying it is either an unknown format or damaged. Surely there must be a way that would actually allow to recover these files.

thanks.

 

[ukmicky]

No. But in future you should download large files via a download manager like flashget , or one of the bittorrent programs like uttorent ,azureus etc as they can keep track of what has been downloaded and restart from the point which you stopped the down load

 

[ranger]

So youre saying that the almost 90% completed file is now garbage and there is no way to view its contents?

 

[neutrino]

Not sure if this would work, but did you try extracting them?

 

[ranger]

I have tried to extract them, but I get the same error regarding format or corruption.

btw, the contents of the archive are pictures, text files, and other small little things. So I'd imagine that since the file was 90% completed, I'd be able to recover some of these files.

One more thing, it is actually a zip archive. i thought it was rar becuase winrar poped up to open the archive. Not sure if it would make a difference though.

 

[neutrino]

Hmm...I think there might be some software for getting back stuff from an incomplete download. Something like this...
http://www.surfpack.com/downloads/Advanced-RAR-Repair/38430.html

Better check someplace like Cnet for reviews before downloading.

Google is your friend :)

 

[ukmicky]

The zip file is incomplete so the chances are that all the pictures,and text files will also be incomplete and therefore corrupt. I've tried to do the same thing a long time ago with a 2Gig file of family pics put into split archives, one of the archives got corrupted so i tried extracting what was left .
Most of the pictures were not recognized by any of the programs i tried opening them with and the few that did open were screwed up.


This may work if you want to continue and finish the download.

Try downloading it again from the beginning using the download manager flashget (its free) but stop the download and exit the program after the download has started , then find the folder that flashget is storing the incomplete file in (c:downloads) then switch the zip file that's flashget started downloading for your 90& one , then restart flashget and the download

Flashget places a bc after the file name on incomplete files if the option is turned on so you may need to add this to yours, but its better to turn off the option

 

[mezeb40]

open the archive with winrar .In the Extract Files dialog under 'Miscellaneous' there is an option to 'keep broken files' .Check this before extracting..Winrar will extract as much of the archive as it can and not delete those files when the archive ends prematurely.
Incidentally, often movies are uploaded as multiple rar archives so this feature can used to check quality/resolution before downloading the whole set.

 

[BoredNL]

Edit: Oh my gosh! I just spend 30 minutes trying to post this message! I figured it out though! the word "wget" is blacklisted from this forum somehow. If you try to post any message with the word "wget" by itself (with spaces on both sides of it), physicsforums will not let you post the message! (It doesn't even give an error message if it is part of an edit or "quick reply." If you do a "new reply," then it directs you to a sort of 404 page stating that the page you are replying to doesn't exist and tells you to go back to "www.physicsforums.com". What the heck! Ok, on with my reply. Can someone else help me test this? Try to do a reply in any forum to any message that contains the line, "something something wget something." (minus the italics, I had to put that there for it to post this message). I tested in another forum with the same result.

If you can continue the download.. do so.. wget.exe is a useful command line utility for this. I always put a copy of wget.exe into my c:\windows\system32\ folder so I can run it from the command line anywhere. After downloading a copy of wget.exe and placing it into your c:\windows folder or c:\windows\system32 folder:

1. Open a command window (Go to start, run, type in "cmd" and run it)
2. Go to the path that the file is in (type "cd c:\downloads", replacing "c:\downloads" with wherever the file is)
3. Type "wget.exe -c http://wherever.com/file.zip" (change the wherever.com URL to wherever the file came from and don't use quotation marks). As long as the server supports resuming, this will work however many times you need to resume the file.

If for some reason winrar or winzip or whatever you used to open the file decided to change the last part of the file to close it or something, then.. hmm.. I thought wget.exe had an option to be hack off a certain number of bites and retry from there, but I guess that was another downloader I used to have.. If this presents itself as a problem for you, let me know and I'll look into it further (or google it, or do both). You could optionally use a raw file splitter to cut off the last megabyte of it (make a backup of the original before trying this) and then retry the wget.exe resume.

Sometimes I'll resume a file 20 times before downloading the whole thing with wget.exe and I've never had a corrupt download from it.

You might want to look into wget.exe even if it doesn't apply here if you've never heard of it. It's a great command line downloader with tons of options.

 

[fyz]

Hi,

There is a tool called Advanced Zip Repair. I have used it to repair many corrupt Zip files on my damaged disks successfully. Its web address is www datanumen com/azr/ If necessary, you can have a try.

Alan

 

[Mk]

Edit: Oh my gosh! I just spend 30 minutes trying to post this message! I figured it out though! the word "wget" is blacklisted from this forum somehow. If you try to post any message with the word "wget" by itself (with spaces on both sides of it), physicsforums will not let you post the message! (It doesn't even give an error message if it is part of an edit or "quick reply." If you do a "new reply," then it directs you to a sort of 404 page stating that the page you are replying to doesn't exist and tells you to go back to "www.physicsforums.com". What the heck! Ok, on with my reply. Can someone else help me test this? Try to do a reply in any forum to any message that contains the line, "something something wget something." (minus the italics, I had to put that there for it to post this message). I tested in another forum with the same result.

That's probably from the character limit of ≤10, not that the word is blacklisted :)

 

[Borek]

Looks like naive way of not allowing wget.exe based scripts from being run on vBulletin server.