WinRAR archive question/s

[coffin filler]

Hi all

Straight to it then.

I have Winrar v 3.71 installed (new version)
The problem I have is as follows.

I have purchased QWET and the UK retail DVD is 5G in size. Obviously this causes a problem when wanting to back up my game for obvious reasons.

Normally I would make an Image and then burn to DVD but due to being 5G this is not an option.

In the past when I have wanted to back up games that are larger than 4.7G
I have made an Image and then used WinRAR to create a archive. (ie 6G game image can be lots of 1OOMB RAR files. Obviously this helps when wanting to back a game up as you can fit the correct number of 100MB rar onto a DVD until its full and then do the same again with another rar archive and so on. Then its simply put all rar files off DVD's into a folder and extract the image. Hey presto).

When I make an Image of ETQW the image is fine (I can install and run game from image made from retail DVD). I then make a archive of various rars at 100MB until the whole 5G is divided up into 100MB rars. When I attempt to extract the Image from the rars (something ive done time and time again) this time near 80% of extraction I keep getting crc error. Obviously this then renders the whole archive useless :(

Any suggestions on what I can do to stop this happening ?
Are there any options within winrar I can alter that may help to stop corruption of rar files ?
Will makeing a recovery record stop the corruption of rar file when extracting ? (and if so how dose one USE the recovery record?)
I have made winrar archives of many games that are over 4.7G in the past. Obviously when paying out my money I want to protect my investment by backing it up and I also have 3 boys all who use the PC so as you can guess I like to back everything up.

If anyone has a suggestion on how to make a winrar archive of a game Image (made with DT Pro) that is 5g please offer your advice.

Thanks for taking the time to read this post and hopefully offer a solution.

[TippeX]

i guess you cant use dvd9 blanks to record the backup onto?
firstly, the winrar issue, i have seen before, so if you can answer the following i can help further

1. are you unraring the rars from hard disk, or a backup burned to dvd? (if its the backup burned, try unraring from the hard disk sets, see if the same error happens)..
2. usually decompression errors can be caused by a few things, the most obvious is bad/overclocked memory, so have you overclocked your system?
3. have you tried unraring on another pc, just to see if its your pc that is at fault, or the rar set..
4. try playing with the compression options in winrar... does the problem persist?

*edit* i just saw your sig, you state the pc is overclocked, try making it normal clocked.. overclocking is very very misunderstood...
overclocking can play hell with compression/decompression.... and do you really gain *that* much performance from a few measily mhz?

[DABhand]

Another reason why I dont overclock or give advice to people who come to my shop who ask about it.

So much errors and problems arise from overclocking (and hardware stress) that in the long run its more of a problem than a solution to play games that little bit quicker.

Especially with AMD's, remember that extra few Mhz speed could lose the systems calibrated speed with CPU to RAM.

[Joe Forster/STA]

Compress the same file with the same options again, onto the hard disk. Do you get the very same error message? If so, you found a bug in WinRAR. (Yes, it happens, even if extremely rarely - there was one in the 2.xx versions that caused undecompressable archives made from perfectly normal files.) Otherwise refer to the others' ideas...

[coffin filler]

Hey guys

Thanks for the input.

Ok so firstly I looked at what was stated by TippeX + DABhand (Overclocked cpu).

So I thought Id have another go making a archive for ETQW using the default values for CPU.

Same problem even when no hardware was overclocked.

I tried another time and same problem which led to to belive what Joe Forster/STA stated was looking very likely. (The archive I have mentioned has not been burned to a DVD yet as I always check the archive making sure the extraction process is 100% and works ok before i burn to DVD)

I decided to give it another go (a last attempt sort of thing as I hate giving up on anything PC related).

And it works !! I made another archive (each time I have made an archive I have always used the same image to make the archive from as the image is ok).

I have tested the archive twice on my HDD and each time no issues. Mabey it is an issue with winrar ?? And as a result of trying to make an archive a few times eventualy it worked. I dont know if it is winrar related or not. I was going to install an older version and try with that but now its worked I wont bother.

Now I need to put the archive onto DVD so I hope after burning the archive to DVD and then copy/paste to HDD the archive still works and I can extract the image. It should be ok as normaly once I have made an archive in the past and burned to DVD its worked once i copy/paste to HDD.

Thanks for the pointers. Ill post back and let you know if the burning of archive to DVD corrupts the archive once I copy/paste it to HDD.