Zip file too large

  • Thread starter Thread starter Guest
  • Start date Start date
G

Guest

I did a clean install of Windows a week ago to get rid of certain unwanted
programs and before that I did a backup of my photos. It's easy in XP so I
just used the built-in zip-tool and zipped them up and moved them to another
harddrive before formatting and re-installing.

When I later tried to unzip the file I ran into trouble. It was corrupt or
something. After a lot of searching and trying and thinking I think I know
where the problem is. The file is too large. Apparently the zip-format is can
only work with files up to 4Gig and I think my photos were somewhat over that
limit.

Why am I allowed to create a zip-file that is too large? And more
importantly, how do I get my pictures back?
 
Try a stand alone zip program.

--
Dennis

Disclaimer: The above is my opinion. I do not guarantee it. Be sure to back
up any files involved and use at your own risk. Batteries not included. Not
for internal use. Don't run with knives.
 
Thank You for your quick response.

I've downloaded and installed the program, but it freezes almost instantly
when it starts scanning my hard drive. Or is it just a painfully slow process?

Btw, I'm not looking for the old deleted photos, because I formatted that
drive the hard way. I'm looking for something to make me able to see into the
too-large-zip-file and extract my pictures from there. Is that was this
application can do?

"Mike Hall - MS MVP Windows Shell/User" skrev:
 
I have tried quite a few and they just say

Cannot open file: it does not appear to be a valid archive.


I'm not sure that I ever will be able to extract my pictures. And there's no
use trying to repair the file, right? Cause even if I repair it, it will
again be too large for the zip-format to be able to handle it.

I'm not 100% certain that this is the problem, but I'm as sure as you can
get. If you know what I mean.



"Dennis Marks" skrev:
 
It takes a while to scan the drive for lost/deleted files.. how bad do you
want them back?..
 
Really bad... I'm running some sort of "fix corrupt zip-files by extracting
the data from them"-program right now, but if that doesn't work I'll have to
try the PC Inspector thing again.

I cannot figure out why Windows didn't tell me to stop zipping the files
when the resulting zip-file was too large for the format to handle.

"Mike Hall - MS MVP Windows Shell/User" skrev:
 
It didn't do it. This app just splits the file in smaller files with a .exe
to build it back up again. It doesn't care whether it's a .zip-file,
..dat-file or whatever. So the problem will remain even though the file is
split in four parts.

Thanks anyway.

"Byte" skrev:
 
When you reinstalled XP did you by chance format your hard drive as FAT 32
instead of NTFS? If so, there is a 4 GB limit to the hard drive file size.
Convert to NTFS and then see if that solves your problem.
 
Still not a good idea to commit that many files to one zip file..
 
Mike, I agree with what you say about the size of the zip file but was
trying to get him to use a later version of WinZip in an attempt to enable
the extraction of the files. Previous version of WinZip had a 4 GB limit
but 9 and later has no effective limit (only available memory for the tables
I believe.)

From WinZip's web site: "The original Zip file format limited the number of
member files in a Zip file to 65,535, and the maximum size of both the Zip
file itself and any member file to 4 gigabytes. For all practical purposes,
the 64-bit extended format eliminates all these restrictions. Using the
extended format, the member file size, Zip file size, and number of member
files you can add to a Zip file are limited only by your system's
resources."
 
Back
Top