HardwareBanter - View Single Post - Data corruption in all my downloaded .zip files

**[email protected]** · August 4th 07, 09:36 PM posted to alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt

On Fri, 03 Aug 2007 08:41:10 -0700, wrote:

this has been going on for about 6 months now. I had started using the
site Direct2drive.com back in 2006 and had great success with their
service. I had downloaded a few games from them, some fairly large
like Neverwinter Nights 2. but around March somewhere I began having
problems. I downloaded Oblivion from them and ended up having a
massive amount of corrupted data in the .zip i downloaded from them.
at the time i was using winrar for my .zips so i downloaded a winzip
trial but experienced the same problem all around. It really shouldnt
have mattered either way since the downloader for D2D.com has its
own .zip unpacker anyway. But ever since then I have been having
problems with data corruption in any zip files or bit torrents I
download. For some reason movies seem to be fine, but video games are
always corrupted in some manner. anyone know of what could be causing
this data corruption or what I can do to try and pinpoint what the
problem is? I did a scandisk and checked my hardrive for any damage
but it came back as being fine, and I've defragged it to complete
cleanliness.

I'd begin by downloading from a site that is fairly reputable. Maybe
download something like Firefox or Opera (from their home sites) and
see if they work, or get something from Tucows (I never had problems
with their downloads). If those work, then you are getting stuff from
a bad site. Bit Torrent stuff can be pure garbage, and who knows what
Direct2drive has. (never been there). You can also download
pkzip/unzip (the Dos version), and see if that will unzip them. If
none of this helps, you may have a hardware problem.
I've goitten bad downloads, but most of the time they were bad at the
source. Re-downloading them just gave me another bad file.