FIX CORRUPTED RAR FILES

CRC Errors In RAR Files

First of all, you need to bypass the CRC check when extracting the files. My solution is to completely ignore all the errors.


What you must do is go to WinRAR in the Start Menu. In winrar you click File -> Open and then select the files you want to unrar. Then you click the “Extract To” icon and check the box that says “Keep BrokenFiles” under miscellaneous. Any CRC error windows that show up during the extraction you can just ignore and close them. The resulting extracted file worked just fine.

The problem with winrar is when you open a broken rar file, it gives you a warning that the rar is broken and rar creates the folder with no file in it. This is the default setting of winrar but you can change it to open broken, corrupted or partially downloaded file (specially media files which you can plan on VLC media player)


This is what you have to do -
1. On the rar file, right click and click on Extract Files …
2. It will show you a window where you can select the folder where the file should be saved. Now select the checkbox where it says Open Broken Files (see the below image)

and click on OK. Now as usual if its a partial file or broken file, winrar will again give you warning, just cancel it. Once the operation gets over, you should see the partial file or files which winrar was able to extract. This tricks works really well on movie files which are broken into parts, you can download the first part of the movie, extract it to see the quality of it and to decide whether you should download the full movie or not. It also works well for multiple files rar achieve as winrar may be able to extract many files.
Unfortunately if there is a single standalone file which is in corrupted rar file, you will be able to get much from it. You can try to repair the rar file but I have never seen it working. Also note that if you have a middle part of the rar, say 2nd or 3rd part of a three part rar archive you won’t be able to get anything as the meta information of every rar file is in the first part.
Edit - You can also try to use 7 Zip software. I have used it many times and it does recover broken zip and rar files. I will make a separate post on 7 zip but felt its worth mentioning it here.

How to repair corrupted .rar or .zip files

Sometimes when you extract a .rar or .zip file it says that 'file is corrupt'. Generally it occurs while compressing the files and when you extract this it says file is corrupt.

So here am telling you how to repair these files so it can become usable again. To do this just follow these steps.

First of all open WinRAR (WinRAR is a software which is used for packing and unpacking of .rar files), then locate the file which is corrupted.


Here just simply click on the file that is corrupted if there are multiple files then hold Ctrl button and click on each file which is corrupt and then just simply press Alt+R, then this screen wil pop up-

Here you have to select that it should treat it as a .rar file or .zip file, select the option .rar if the corrupted file is .rar and select .zip if the corrupted is .zip, after then click ok. After this step the recovery process begins and it identifies all file and recover them.

After this step, when it finishes it shows the file report that which file is corrupted and which one is not and also that the damaged file is recovered.

Now go to the file location where the file was, there you will find a file named "fixed.'file name'". See the image below

I found it very useful when I was using to extract a file but suddenly it said that some part of these files are corrupt and then this helped to get rid of this problem. 

Few Tricks To Avoid CRC Errror...

1)
I was getting crc errors trying to extract from a multivolume solid rar archive. Tried many repair tools & programs, including latest winrar. even "keeping broken files" didnt work - the files were extracted but were corrupt. then i found a FUNKY program called 7-zip:
www.7-zip.org

It extracted the files with NO PROBLEMS!!! this proved that the
source files were fine all along. Try 7-zip - its free, compresses better and fixes problems that winrar
itself cant fix!....


2)
If can't fix a corrupted files Try avoiding From the Beginning !!! YES , from my experiences i can tell you only one advise : it tells ( when you try to download any files , do not try to divide these files by using the option at your download manager under max connection 8, 16 etc !!! but only use 1 connection ) .
Go to Internet Download Manager -> Options -> Connections-> Default Max Num Connection number 1 .....

3)
This actually worked for me. Really pretty simple:
1. Install VLC
Here’s the link:
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-windows.html
2. Start to unrar (extract) AVI files.
3. As the files are extracting, open the started AVI file with VLC. When VLC is open it will determine the
AVI file is corrupted and ask you if you want to repair. Say yes and the full AVI file will be built.
The whole repair process will take a minute or so.

I was able to play the completed AVI file with no problem with Windows Media Player. I then made DVD files with “ConvertX to DVD” and then burned with Nero.

Just when I thought the AVI Winrar files were too corrupt to work, this solution worked like a charm.


4)
1. Start extraction from the first part.
2. Immediately go to the folder where its is being extracted. You will see a .avi file being created.
3. As soon as RAR encounters the corrupt file, it may delete this 'temporary file' - so as soon as u know the corrupt archive part is about to be extracted (maybe a few minutes more), make a copy of it in Explorer. You need to be very agile in this step and it may take a few tries. 
4. Now you have a incomplete avi. If its a DivX file, use DivX fix, a utility to fix incomplete avis.