ISOs have suddenly stopped working...

TerrorFirmer

I had a lot of images, backed them all up to external drive and installed a fresh OS. Now, however, when I install any of them using Daemon tools or MagicISO, they either

1) Install correctly but then fail to run, citing 'cannot read x', or 'y not found'
2) Start to install but half way through stop with error along lines of 'unreadable'
3) Won't load at all, with error message.

Is it possible that somehow only ISO's have become corrupted? I really doubted it as I had lots of data archives that work perfectly still, but every ISO no longer works. It's Win7 by the way, though these ISOs worked on it before fine.

Any help appreciated, it's really quite annoying.

Nietzschean

Try a chkdsk on the external hd as a first off, if you have something else on it besides iso's that would require consistency to work(i.e. not a video/music) maybe try that too

Presuming you own/have this software, make a new image from the original disc of one of them and compare the MD5 of that iso to the one you have stored, if the disc isn't damaged/iso is ok they should match.

Other than that, try copy off all the files from an iso, normally a corrupted one would have issues with this...

next up i guess try another machine?, or use a bart PE environment and use an iso in it

Likelyhood of faults here lie
1) HD corruption, alot of non-iso type files are smaller or won't break(vidz/music) if a few blocks get moved about/corrupted, but iso's would obviously suffer more...
2) Win7, it is beta, might just be some sort of funky random install artifact

TerrorFirmer

The files copy off the ISO fine, without any issue at all. Anything thats basically not an ISO works fine from the same HD - this includes archived files up to 10GB, tried several and they all work perfect, just not the images. I would peg it down to Win7 but they all worked fine on Win7 prior to this. Haven't tried on another machine yet, none available to me...

Nietzschean

does sound like its a sware issue on win7, maybe try another app instead of daemon tools, what was that one alcohol 120% ? ... failing that if you have a vista/xp disc give one of them an install i suppose... (Also if you use burning software and burn off the iso and install from that, it would be somewhat telling if that worked then)

Overheal

I dont see how multiple ISOs could have been corrupted in the same way like that. To be absolutely sure, fetch a smaller ISO, from a CD_ROM or something. I doubt it.

Sounds definitely like software. Is your Virtual Drive Driver updated for compatibility with Windows 7 yet. Was it windows 7 beta? RC? something may have changed.

Again, all I can suggest is make sure all your drivers and updates are to date and try getting all fresh files for magic disc and an ISO.

TerrorFirmer

Back to WinXP Corp, every single ISO is still corrupted, but every single data archive is perfectly fine. Talk about annoying - what the heck could have gone wrong there?

Nietzschean

i don't suppose any of the other large files you'd be able to source md5's to ensure they are really the same(and its not hd corruption) and not somehow still working? just to rule it out....

other than that i guess virus/malware would be top of the list as likely culprit, did you try alcohol 120%?

Overheal

Might be that the external was formatted differently. You know the way. You can change the size of each of the memory adresses to super small or as big as 4mb, etc.

Nietzschean

well the allocation size shouldn't effect anything working one way or another, larger allocation size just means your more likely to have wasted space at the end of the file but less space wasted on inode allocations....

TerrorFirmer

Nietzschean wrote: »

i don't suppose any of the other large files you'd be able to source md5's to ensure they are really the same(and its not hd corruption) and not somehow still working? just to rule it out....

other than that i guess virus/malware would be top of the list as likely culprit, did you try alcohol 120%?

I'll have to get them back but yep I can, I'm interested to discover why. I would say HD corruption but every single archive (there were dozens; against about 10 ISOs) works 100%. Tried every program, always the same.

MjM

Just a thought, try and open them with winrar, it treats iso's like zip/rar files. Maybe they won't mount but you might be able to see the files? Just try it as an experiment anyway.