Steve T said:
My brother is working on an XP Pro Compaq and has this problem:
..not being able to read a zip file on a CD-R disc which my
Sony(win98SE) was able to read. I even tried the same CD-R on another
XP computer and it read everything else on the CD-R except the zip
file. I needed the zip file to finish installing one application.
However, I put that same zip file on a 3.5 floppy and the drive read
it. Why is XP Pro having a hard time reading zip file from a CD-R?
Thank you, Steve T
So what program did you use under Windows 98SE to create the .zip file?
It's been way too long since I used Windows 98[SE] but I don't remember
that it included native support for .zip files. If you are using an old
version of Winzip, it did have a problem of calculating an incorrect CRC
value for a file that it then recorded in the .zip file. When you
attempted to extract the file from a .zip archive, you get a message
that the CRC was invalid (it calculates another CRC for the extracted
file and compares it against the recorded CRC value in the .zip file).
However, there was an option to extract the file despite the incorrect
CRC value. So although WinZip would bitch about a bad CRC, you could
still extract the file (and use at your own risk). I was able to
reproduce the problem at-will and reported it to WinZip. That was back
in version 8.x (don't remember the sub-version). If you are using
WinZip, did you upgrade to the new version 9? I haven't been able to
reproduce the CRC error in Winzip 9 but then I haven't had the time to
test it, either, but I'm still keeping my PKZip around in case it
appears again (since PKzip did not have the CRC problem). The CRC
problem in WinZip 8 was reproducible but not not prevalent.
As with all the other "tack-on" features added by Microsoft that are
crippled versions of software from other parties (NT Backup from
Veritas, Disk Cleanup from Cleansweep, defrag from Diskeeper, etc.),
don't expect full functionality from this "reduced feature" compressed
archiving utility that got slapped into Windows XP. In this case,
Microsoft included a crippled version of DynaZip (go read
http://www.innermedia.com/company.html, and also notice "DynaZip" in the
zipfldr.dll file). Did Microsoft integrate compressed archive file
support into their core file system? No. Did they include an
installable file system to support compressed archive files, like
ZipMagic does (and like CDFS that gets loaded as an installable file
system to support CDs)? No. Instead they defined a filetype and use
zipfldr.dll to supply the functionality for that filetype (i.e., the
functionality gets tacked on by filetype). If you want full
functionality for compressed archiving then get a 3rd party product.
If you are burning the .zip file onto a CD-R[W] disc, have you tried
re-burning it onto the same disc? Maybe you have a bad spot (scratched,
cloudy, bubbled film, etc.). Or you could try a different disc. Does
the recipient have problems reading other files or other CDs that you
send them? Could be one of you has a CD-type drive that is out of
alignment, or maybe you are burning at a higher speed than the
recipient's drive can read.
