The 5-Step Binaries Tutor
Step 1. What Are Binaries?Step 2. How Do I Find Binaries?
Step 3. How Do I Download Binaries?
Step 4. How Do I Reassemble Binaries?
Step 5. How Do I Repair Binaries?
Software And Configuration Tips
USENET News Services To Download Binaries
5. How Do I Repair Binaries?
Imagine this: you've spent hours downloading an extremely large file, all 90 parts of it, but some of the files turn out to be fnarkled! (YES, FNARKLED!) Now what?
No problem, thanks to little repair files known as PAR (.par) files, short for parity, and their second-generation cousins, PAR2 (.par2) files. When a person creates a binary archive, he or she also creates a set of PAR files that can be used to repair the archive, along with a master PAR file to get the process going.
Repairing binaries is quite easy, but let's start at the beginning.
Can I Spot A Damaged Archive Before Reassembly?
Yes. You'll be configuring NewsLeecher© to CAPITALIZE the names of damaged or incomplete files so you can see at a glance, even before you attempt reassembly, if you'll need to do any repair work. For example, after the files have been downloaded, you might see something like this in the download folder on your hard drive:
If you tried to reassemble this archive the attempt would fail because the highlighted PART03 and PART08 chunks are incomplete or damaged and need some PAR magic before reassembly.
To do the repair work you're going to rely on a free program called QuickPar©. QuickPar is the doctor and PAR files are its sutures.
QuickPar the Binary Doctor
With QuickPar installed, all you have to do is click on the master PAR2 file to get the PAR process going. A master PAR2 file is automatically included with every archive, and will always appear at the top of the list, as seen in the screenshots above and below.
Clicking on the master PAR2 file triggers open QuickPar (seen below), which will start a verification and integrity process of each file in the archive. When it's finished it will tell you how many "blocks" are required to repair the set, as noted in the green bar:
Getting The PAR File Blocks You Need
PAR files use "building blocks" or 'blocks' to repair binaries, and as mentioned earlier, every archive comes with a set of PAR files for repair purposes. Our nifty friend the .nzb file imported pointers to the PAR files in NewsLeecher©. (Click Queue tab in NewsLeecher to see the queue.) PAR files are set to Pause-mode and placed at the end of the queue, as seen in the screenshot below. PAR files are not downloaded automatically because they are only needed if an archive arrives damaged or incomplete.
Each PAR2 file contains one or more blocks, named according to how many blocks it contains. In the screenshot above look at the number after the plus sign (+), highlighted in green, and you'll see that the first PAR2 contains only one block.
The PAR2 files following it contain 2, 4, 8, 16, 27 and then 35 blocks each, respectively. Each PAR2 is complete and can be used independently of the others and in any order. Download the number of blocks required by choosing any combination of files. It isn't necessary to download more blocks than required, but doing so won't hurt anything.
In this case we would double-click on a 35-block PAR2 to change it from Paused to Queued, then begin the download. Once downloaded, QuickPar automatically repairs and rebuilds the archive. If the downloaded binary archive is large, this process can take a few minutes.
And when QuickPar is done...
...you close it out, and go to the folder with your binaries. Follow Step 4. How Do I Reassemble Binaries? by clicking on the first RAR in the archive to decompress and combine the archive back into a single, large file.
And that's it! Congrats!
