uckfay my omputercay

L

Linsky

First time out of the vault
im trying to do a manual install on windows 2000 for fallout two but when i try to copy CRITTER or MASTER it gives me an error:

"Cannot copy Master: data error (cyclic redundancy check)"




WTF is a cyclic redundancy check? and why cant i copy them to my HD?
 
Wouldn't it be more correct if the title said "uckfay myay omputercay"?
 
Cyclic redundancy code is a protective code used in compressive formats like ZIP or RAR (in conjunction with RLE - run length encoding, a type of code which replaces rows of zeros or ones with tables which contain information how many times zero or one is repeated). CRC (much like its older brother Hamming) basically ensures data integrity by enhancing a dataword with a certain number of protective bits that are calculated based on contents of the dataword. When the archive is extracted, all protective bits are recalculated and if they differ from protective bits stored within the archive, it means data corruption occured. This is your failed "cyclic redundancy check".

I don't really know what could solve your problem. If the format of compressed files on the Fallout CD is recognized by WinRAR or a similar program, you can try and repair the archive. That doesn't always work, however.
 
nitpicking ahoi:

CRC doesnt apply to compressed formats alone. all data can be protected with an CRC, may they be compressed or not.
 
Yeah, I thought "Bad CRC" was what you got from diskettes that have been lying in a dusty drawer for six years.
 
SuAside said:
nitpicking ahoi:

CRC doesnt apply to compressed formats alone. all data can be protected with an CRC, may they be compressed or not.
Click to expand...
Of course. CRC is a protective code, not optimal code. It's used in almost every form of information transfer you can imagine, to preserve data integrity.

Which reminds me, when I rambled on about compression, I forgot to mention the most important thing - optimal code. Optimal code replaces information that is most likely to occur with short codewords, and that which is less likely to occur with progressively longer codewords. A lot of space is saved that way. For example, if you were to code an English text, letter 'a' would be replaced with a shorter codeword than letter 'x', since it is statistically more likely to occur. When used in conjunction with RLE, optimal coding can save a lot of space / bandwidth. Two best known optimal coding algorhythms are Huffman method and Shanning-Fano method.

Hmph, this doesn't in any way relate to Linsky's problem. Oh, well...
 
the solution seems so obvious that im ashamed for asking for help. i just open the dat files with data explorer and saved the files to a directory in the fallout 2 folder.


PS: i got the same error when i tried to install the fallout 1 demo on a school library computer with the same OS as mine, so i guess windows NT just hates me and\or dat files
 
Linsky said:
PS: i got the same error when i tried to install the fallout 1 demo on a school library computer with the same OS as mine, so i guess windows NT just hates me and\or dat files
Click to expand...

Or more likely you have a few bad bits on your CD. Try to get a clean copy and make backups. Use WinISO to make an ISO file and store that on your hard drive. I probably have a dozen backups of fallout. Rest assured I will never be without them.

BTW Win2K IS NT ... It's NT5 and it uses the same NTFS file system, so I really doubt that NT is the problem here.
 
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