StuffIt decompression errors on fragmented disks
StuffIt decompression errors on fragmented disks
"My own experience with errors upon decompression began with StuffIt 6 and 6.0.1 and Mac OS 9.1. Large (20 MB) archives would decompress their contents with errors and an alert to use the contents with caution. The extracted contents were usually not valid files. I found it hard to believe that the archives themselves were bad, and I was right. A large archive that would decompress perfectly on one Mac would fail on another Mac.
I believe the problem is caused by fragmented free space on your hard disk where an archive's contents can become corrupt if the archive file is larger than any one fragment of free space on the hard disk where it resides. Severe fragmentation of free space probably makes the problem worse. Aladdin, aware of the problem, offered me a few stopgap solutions:
- Defragment your hard disk, and be aware that contiguous free space should exceed the size of the archive to be decompressed by Stuffit Deluxe or Aladdin Expander 6.0.x.
- Convert your .sit archive to a self-extracting archive (.sea), and double-click on the archive to decompress instead of using Stuffit Deluxe or Aladdin Expander 6.0.1.
- Use Aladdin/Stuffit Expander 5.5 to decompress your archives. This application does not use the Stuffit 6 Engine that is apparently at the heart of the problem. I can confirm that Stuffit Expander 5.5 successfully decompressed large archives where Stuffit 6 had failed."