Friday 4 August 2000

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Duff bins?

When I use Winrar, Winace or SFV Checker to test a home-brew disk image archive, no errors are reported, however, when I extract the bin file, Winrar/Winace reports CRC errors. If I choose to ignore these errors and burn the image anyway, will it work?

This is quite a common problem, yet shouldn't always be a cause for concern. Many bin files despite containing errors will run perfectly well. You may experience very minor glitches from time to time, for instance, video screens freezing or jumpy sound playback, but nothing so serious as to spoil your enjoyment of the game (assuming it is a game we're talking about and not an application). That said, before burning the bin file, it's good practice to attempt to repair it using CD Mage; you have nothing to lose and everything to gain from giving it a shot anyway.

Nevertheless, it could be that you are looking in the wrong department for the source of the error. Plenty of CRC errors result from using faulty RAM SIMMs so I would suggest running some tests on yours using SIMM Tester to eliminate this possibility.

If your RAM passes the health check, yet Winace or Winrar still report CRC errors, your hard drive could be to blame instead - if you are trying to extract the file to an area of the drive which contains damaged clusters, this will have the same outcome. To remove this factor from the equation check your drive using MS Scandisk or try extracting to a different drive if you have more than one.

Another possibility is that your copy of Winace or Winrar needs updating - it could be that your version is outdated and is therefore incompatible with the archive. Ideally you should use a version of Winace or Winrar which is the same as, or newer than the one used to create the archive - a useful thing to check if you're creating and extracting images on different computers.