Re: [Sheflug] I hate Windoze, Samba and RAID.

["Alex Hudson" <nospam [at] york.ac.uk>]

>  Something wierd has happened to my tar, tar.gz and tar.bz2 files I
> copied via ftp to a Win98 machine, and copied back to my very fresh
> Linux machine via SMB.
>  Everything was messed with....tar and gzip all throw errors.
>  4.5Gb of stuff down the tube.
>  I`ve still got the files on the Windoze machine if anyone has any
> ideas.

I'm afraid to be the author of bad news, but....

Well, let's not write it off immediately. Get Winzip, or some other such, on
your Win98 machine if it's not there already. That should be able to open
.tar, and .tar.gz. Remember, .tar doesn't compress - it just packages, so if
the contents of the .tar are just plaintext files you can safely look at the
file contents in Wordpad or something. If Winzip doesn't work on them (i.e.,
throws an error), then your files are corrupted. Why? Dunno. You *did* copy
the files over ftp as *binary*, didn't you? Autodetecting doesn't always
work, and command line ftp commands often default to ascii. The difference
is bigger than you would think, if you ever wondered why the options were
there. ASCII transfer is faster - it only uses 7 bits, so rather than waste
the top bit you can pack bytes into a bitstream, saving 1/8th of your
bandwidth - useful, especially with big files. Binary, on the other hand, is
8-bit clean. An ASCII transfer of a binary file is basically zero-ing the
top bit of every byte in the file - you'll find all your programs, etc., are
now viewable in text editors :-S. And no, you can't fix it, because that
requires a priori knowledge, which is something you don't have (you zeroed
it ;). If this is actually what happened, you have 4.5Gb of meaningless 1s
and 0s, I'm afraid. I can't imagine any other way the data was corrupted,
unless a) it wasn't made correctly in the first place (you did test it,
right?) or b) you have a faulty hard drive (which you would have probably
noticed by now anyway).

If Winzip *does* work, and lets be positive, the data is still there. Why
SMB corrupted it is anyone's guess, but I don't care to offer an explanation
since I find it unlikely that it did - I think the explanation will be with
ftp.

Cheers,

Alex.

P.S. I *did* warn you of the consequences of making a pact with UNIX satan,
didn't I? Not that I'm sayng it's related, of course, but I suspect your
machine of working against you ;))


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