Sunday, July 13, 2008

WinRar Corrupt Files

WinRar Corrupt Files (CRC Error!) or wrong password error.

There are two ways to enter a password: Copy Paste and Type It yourself. Only after trying both this options you can say for sure that you have the wrong password. Sometimes it's possible WinRar gives the wrong password error because there's a corrupt file, so check if that's not the case.

WinRar Corrupt Files (CRC Error!) FAQ entry here:

You downloaded all the files and now WinRar says that the files are corrupted and / or wrong password error.

How to solve this?

First you must know exactly which file(s) is / are corrupted. When WinRar gives back the error it says which file(s) is / are corrupted. But to be sure, open each file at a time. When opening each file, if the file is corrupt winrar will give an error immediately.

Now you know which file(s) is / are corrupted

There are 2 Methods to solve this:

Method 1:

Open the corrupted part, and press "ALT + R"

When all went well, the file will be ok.

Alternative Method 1:

Step 1: Open Winrar and navigate to the folder containing the *.rar files. If you open the first file you can navigate to the folder using the up button.




Step 2: Highlight / select all of the files associated with the archive and click the repair button. This will take some time.




Step 3: Use the repaired files to extract the previously corrupted content. The files will have the prefix "rebuilt." added to them.



Note: Most of the time there are only 1 or 2 corrupted files and there is no need to repair the ones that are OK. To do this, you must know which files are bad and select those files and repair them. Once repaired, delete the original files and remove the "rebuilt." prefix from the repaired files. Finaly, extract as usual.

If Method 1 does not work please try Method 2.

Method 2:

Step 1: Download the file or files that are corrupted again.

Step 2: Extract using WINRAR. Problem should be solved.

What if these methods did not work:

If you downloaded the file again and it's still corrupted, make sure your downloads are 100% downloaded. Sometimes the download ends abruptly near the end. Check file size. Usually only the last file has a different size, all others should have the same size. Compare the file sizes to see if the problem is from the download or if it really is the file that's corrupted.

At last, use the Contact Us option to report the problem, so that the poster tells the uploader to check the files and replace them if needed.

Suggestion:

You can try to save the content file(s) even with a corrupted WinRar file. Use the same procedure described at "AVI Preview with WinRar" to extract the content. If the content file is an AVI file you may have luck and the damaged frames might be unnoticeable or it might be fixable with specific programs to fix AVI files index. If the content of the WinRar file is a bunch of files, you may have luck also because the problem might stay at an info file not needed to install the program, for example.