Empty archives?

[joeyramonerip]

I've dl'ed a couple of rar & ace files from emule and when they are opened, after scanning with norton, it appears that they are empty. ie, they have some sort of file structure but no files.

despite this they show up as xMB on explorer and are displayed in emule as being xMB. Any explanations or workarounds so I can access these files would be appreciated.

I am using an appropriate archiver to open the files, so I doubt if that's the problem. (winace)

[eBwoy]

I've dl'ed a couple of rar & ace files from emule and when they are opened, after scanning with norton, it appears that they are empty. ie, they have some sort of file structure but no files.

despite this they show up as xMB on explorer and are displayed in emule as being xMB. Any explanations or workarounds so I can access these files would be appreciated.

I am using an appropriate archiver to open the files, so I doubt if that's the problem. (winace)
C'mon geezer - give us a little more information . . can you open the archives ? and if so, what happens . . . are they corrupted or do they decompress ? and what do you mean by xMB etc etc

[origin]

Sometimes when decompressing a different format than the native decompressing softwares format it will not function correctly. I am not saying that this happens all the time, that sometimes hypothetically speaking it might not see the contents of the archive. U might want to try to open the archives with Winzip instead of winrar or Winace. Something you might notice is that when the archive size is larger than 2.0 gig winrar will not recognize the files within it some wierd bug!. On the flip side the archive is possibly damaged or not ever filled with the supposed files that it has supposed to have in it. If in fact it is damaged there is no way to fix it in a sucessfull manner I would just discard the file instead of keep trying to fix a broken cause.

Grab Winzip Here. (http://www.winzip.com)
Grab Winrar Here. (http://www.rarlabs.com)
Grab Winace Here. (http://www.winace.com)

l8

[joeyramonerip]

Fair enough, I didn't want to post details of the dl's here as I didn't think it was allowed on the forums, but here goes...

Yes, I can open the rar & ace files with winace. But in winace the folder structure seems to have been compressed fine, but no files are showing. This leads me to believe that the files are empty except for these folders, but in winace and on emule and in win explorer the archives all have file sizes of xMB - where x is the same number between all three progs. Which is odd to say the least.

The last one which happened like this was Vitalic presents Onurb - defrost (ep citizen records 002) 2002 Electro 192 Ktmp3 and it has an apparent file size of 31Mb or there abouts (real file size is apparently 30.5Mb). This has also happened with a other archives of mp3's (ritchie hawtin, dave clarke, plastikman, theivery corporation, etc etc).

My question is this - Where are the fucking files? If the archive size is 30Mb (or whatever) why is there nothing in the archive but an empty folder (or two in some cases).

Decompressing the file only places an the empty folder structure on my hard-drive, even when I have "show hidden files" checked in win explorer nothing is in the folder(s) which appear after decompressing the archive. Checked the details with winace during decomp and only the folder(s) gets decompressed. An empty folder of apparent 30.5MB size!!? This is my problem. It makes no sense.

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

[joeyramonerip]

Thanks origin, I'll try to open the archive with winrar instead of winace and see if that works. Just assumed that winace would deal with all archives and do the job. Should know better than that.

[origin]

you're welcome.

l8

[mrNice]

I had this problem, which was driving me nuts. A folder with 5 mB in isn't empty, there's stuff there, though the zip might be corrupt. Anyway, none of my zip apps would open these archives - winrar etc. all failed. Then for a giggle I d/l'ed a couple more and tried them. Bing! QuickZip2 opened them no sweat. You can get it at www.quickzip.org . Looks like there is a later version now. This, and other zip app problems, have been niggling at a few ppl I know lately, so see this file on eMule (sometimes): Zip apps info.txt

[evilmegaman]

Have you made sure to uncheck "hide hidden folders and files"? that can help a lot. it helped on my friends comp..