Path: utzoo!attcan!lsuc!maccs!cs4g6ag
From: cs4g6ag@maccs.dcss.mcmaster.ca (Stephen M. Dunn)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Any Packard Bell wizards out there?
Keywords: >>>  PACKED FILE IS CORRUPT  <<<   Yuck!
Message-ID: <2581E097.2758@maccs.dcss.mcmaster.ca>
Date: 10 Dec 89 04:50:31 GMT
References: <265@fortytwo.UUCP>
Reply-To: cs4g6ag@maccs.dcss.mcmaster.ca (Stephen M. Dunn)
Organization: McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario
Lines: 23

In article <265@fortytwo.UUCP> tim@fortytwo.UUCP (Tim Baker) writes:
$Has ANYONE seen this error message or know why I am getting it on
$a Packard Bell machine with a 286 CPU.  It occurs when I run 
$several programs so I know it is not the software.

   That's not a Packard Bell message, it's a standard MS-DOS message.
It means that an .EXE file in packed form is ... well, corrupt!  There's
at least one byte wrong.

   .EXE programs can be run through a utility called EXEPACK (and recent
versions of Microsoft's linker have a switch that does the same) which,
in most cases, reduces their sizes (sometimes by quite a bit - I have
a couple of 200K or so .EXEs that lose 15-20K when exepacked!).  This
is done with a repeated-byte compression sequence on bytes containing
zeroes.  If the loader determines that something is wrong in a packed
file (for instance, a repeated string of zero bytes that was not packed),
it will generate this message.

-- 
Stephen M. Dunn                               cs4g6ag@maccs.dcss.mcmaster.ca
          <std_disclaimer.h> = "\nI'm only an undergraduate!!!\n";
****************************************************************************
    If it's true that love is only a game//Well, then I can play pretend