Have you ever experienced the pain and frustration because you spent literally days to download some software, songs or a documentary movie and to your disappointment got a lot of CRC errors while extracting?
Well I am not sure about what’s the cause for CRC Errors, but there is a solution which works most of the times. You better give it a try before trying to re-download the beast and get the same CRC Errors!
Possible Solution
If you are using winrar, then right click on the file to be extracted and then select Extract files.. option. Once you select this option, you will be presented with a window with whole lot of options. Most of the times people don’t have time to look at all these optional options, so they hit Ok. This process is fast and fine if your files don’t have CRC Errors.
If you do have CRC Errors, then, as shown in below image; check the Keep Broken Files option and then hit Ok. Now don’t be surprised when you get the same errors which you got previously. Be patient and look at the extracted files. Most of the times it shows the errors but it successfully extracts all the files.
Now the trick is: if its some sort of video files, then it may not play in your regular player. Some players might strip the audio because of small errors in the extracted file. With out breaking your heart, just play these files in different media players and you will get the video and audio in one or the other media player. Try VLC player, Media Player Classic or there are many other commercial media players which have the capacity for error detection and correction(if its minor).
Same technique works with WinZip software. In the options select Keep Broken Files and then extract.
This simple process will save hours and hours of your precious time and bandwidth. There are some rar or zip file repair software, but will talk about it in another blog post. For now, keep this simple technique in mind and save yourself from repeated downloads.
Tip: In winrar, if you are extracting files which has a long file name, it starts giving errors. To solve this problem, you can simply rename the .rar file and give some short name before trying to extract it or use 7zip software. 7zip is open source and is highly efficient.
I was at times frustrated when the downloaded files don’t reveal their contents.
Well, that’s a simple tip well explained. Thanks.
@Rohit, This small feature will help save a lot of time. I can feel the frustration after re-downloading a huge file and getting the same CRC Errors again!
In most cases this works and people need not download the stuffs again.
No worry about this CRC error in ZIP file, try Kernel for ZIP repair tool to repair corrupt or damaged ZIP file and fix any type of error in ZIP file folder.