tar error unrecoverable?

[Karl Auer]

On Fri, 2014-01-24 at 15:13 -0600, Curt Tresenriter wrote:
> > >> > I'm trying to unpack a tar.bz2 file that is failing.
> As I said in my first post, it occurred when I tried to unpack it.
> As I said in reply to your suggestion, it happened when I tried to copy
> it to another hard disc.

If you cannot copy it then the problem is with the physical copy on
disk, not the data in the file.

If you can copy it, but not uncompress it, then the problem is corrupted
data in the file.

It sounds as if the problem is with the copy on disk. Don't bother
trying to untar it until you can uncompress it.

By far the best option is to get another copy of the file, then delete
the bad copy and check the rest of that disk very carefully, as this
failure may be evidence of a failing disk.

Make sure your copy (or uncompression) is to a disk formatted with
support for >2G files. If the file is >2Gb and you are unpacking to the
same disk this is unlikely to be the problem, but I thought I'd mention
it. This issue often results in misleading error messages.

You could try using dd (man dd) to copy the file; dd has a "noerror"
option. You might be lucky.

You could try using bzip2's "-v" option to see if you can get more
information about the error.

Since your compressed file is quite large, it contains many blocks (a
standard bzip2 block is around a megabyte in size). You could try
bzip2recover; you may be able to extract everything except the damaged
block(s). "man bzip2" has more information.

Regards, K.

-- 
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Karl Auer (kauer at biplane.com.au)
http://www.biplane.com.au/kauer
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