Old Gits IT Question

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!

7zip is likely to support it?

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

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.

Hmmmm – the files don’t have any extensions 🙁

Is windows set to hide extensions for known file types?

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

See what the files are in the command prompt

See what the files are in the command prompt

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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 😉

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?

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?

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).

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

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”

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.

murray ftw.