Viewing 21 posts - 1 through 21 (of 21 total)
  • Old Gits IT Question
  • rkk01
    Free Member

    Right – nice little brain teaser for the helpful IT literate forum members…

    Some time ago I backed up some drawings and data…
    It was a long time ago…

    Any files over 1.4mb needed to be spanned over multiple 3.5″ disks

    Im now trying to find a utility that might be able to recover the data

    Given that this was ms-dos / Win 3.x era, Im not sure what tool was used to do the backup – might have been pk-zip / pk-unzip, but I’m thinking it might have been a dos backup????

    Any bright ideas would be most welcome!

    xiphon
    Free Member

    7zip is likely to support it?

    Copy all the contents of the separate disks into a folder, then open the first one.

    Cougar
    Full Member

    The filename should give you a clue, what’s the file extension? But yeah, winzip / winrar / 7z should all handle multi-volume archives, as Xiphon suggests.

    rkk01
    Free Member

    Hmmmm – the files don’t have any extensions 🙁

    nickdavies
    Full Member

    Is windows set to hide extensions for known file types?

    rkk01
    Free Member

    Shouldn’t be – I like to be able to see all my files

    xiphon
    Free Member

    See what the files are in the command prompt

    rkk01
    Free Member

    See what the files are in the command prompt

    What, just try to run them in the dos “emulator”…?

    Cougar
    Full Member

    Go to a command prompt (press Windows-R and then type cmd).

    Assuming you’re still using floppies, type dir a: to list what’s on there.

    fuzzhead
    Free Member

    dir a: should show you what’s on the disk – do you have all the disks that were used to create the spanned archive?

    rkk01
    Free Member

    I’ve transferred the files onto a hard drive.

    They do have file extensions – indicating the order of each file / disc in the archive, e. g. .001, .002 etc. I have the complete set for each

    Freester
    Full Member

    Most likely you used winzip to span the disks but you can probably uncompress using 7zip or Peazip.

    molgrips
    Free Member

    Should be a ‘master’ one without the numbers that you open, and it’ll find the others… hopefully.

    rkk01
    Free Member

    Most likely you used winzip to span the disks but you can probably uncompress using 7zip or Peazip.

    I think these pre-date Windows acquiring zip. I’ll give it a go though 😉

    rkk01
    Free Member

    I have had a play with these, and done some research into old archiving software / formats – but with no success.

    7zip will test the archive and report ok, but won’t extract..

    My background research suggests that early versions of pkzip might have used .001, .002 etc file extensions for spanned archives, rather than .z01, .z02, .zip.

    Anyone know if this is correct?

    Cougar
    Full Member

    If you’d asked me from memory I’d have said multi-volume PKZIP files were all .zip and it used the disk volume label to tell them apart. Now you’ve said that, I’m less sure. .001 etc might be ARJ?

    You’ve still not told us what you’ve got there?

    Cougar
    Full Member

    Wait – is it Slice? That split files across multiple volumes without compression (much faster for things that were already compressed), and I’m 99% sure its file extensions were .001, .002 and so on. You’d use the companion Splice to put it back together (which I think gets copied onto the first disk).

    mrjmt
    Free Member

    open them with a hex editor, may find the name of the prog at the beginning of the file.

    Murray
    Full Member

    http://www.jamesewelch.com/2008/01/01/old-school-disk-spanning-dos/

    Joining the files
    1.Open up a DOS Prompt or Command window (Start->Run->”CMD”)
    2.Change directory to where the file is located
    3.Enter “copy /b files.zip.001+files.zip.002+files.zip.003 files.zip”

    eskay
    Full Member

    I used to use some software called breakzip. You had to zip the file then run breakzip to split it up. Was dos based I think but cannot remember the file extensions it generated.

    back2basics
    Free Member

    murray ftw.

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