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From: kgg@zinn.MV.COM (Kenn Goutal)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: debugging mangled .arc files
Keywords: ARC, file repair, file corruption
Message-ID: <798@zinn.MV.COM>
Date: 8 Jul 90 02:01:46 GMT
Organization: Zinn Computer Co., Litchfield NH
Lines: 38

There's probably a newsgroup that deals more directly with the ARC
utility, but I notice that many folks in this group use it, so I'll
start here...

I have a bunch of .arc files, comprising all my Usenet mail for the
past three years, that I recently created from raw 'mbox'-format
files.  The very next day, I ran arc -v on them, and 5 out of 7 of
them were corrupt!  The messages indicated one or more bad headers.
In most cases, there were two bad headers;  the message for the first
was legible, but the message for the second was itself garbled.
Apparently by that point it was so confused that it looked no farther.
When I tried to extract the files from them (-x), the resulting mail
files were quite short compared to their original lengths.
The worst of it is that nearly all the mail that I've exchanged with
various of you since I joined this (atari.st) newsgroup in March is gone.

Does anyone know of a utility or technique(s) whereby I could repair
these files so as to reclaim most, if not all, of the archived material?
Obviously, if a "header" is corrupt, there's not much I can do about
the block to which the header belongs, but I hope that other blocks
thereafter can be found and recovered.

Help!??!!
-- Kenn Goutal

P.S.	Please reply via mail, since I very often miss a few days'
	messages at a time.  I'll prepare to summarize the results
	for anyone who asks.  Thanks again.

UUCP:	kenn@rr.MV.COM		(...decvax!zinn!rr!kenn)
  or:	kenn@zinn.MV.COM	(...decvax!zinn!kenn)
BIX:	kenn
CompuServe:	71117.2572	(PARTI handle == kenn)
TelePath:	kenn

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