Splitted from RAR/Zip mounting suggestion thread

[syraman]

It's not unusual to find cd-images which are stored that way: file.rar, file.r00, file.r01, file.r02 etc

if that's not unusual, please give me some examples!!

First of all, thanks to the DT team for their fine work and support over the years, this is truly the best utility around. And the upcoming support for x64 is just incredible!

I was reading this post and realized that I need to explain what hubbelyo was talking about.

hubbelyo has a great point here. I agree that the support for mounting compressed zip-files (or whatever compression technology) is not very useful, and I guess would be kinda hard to accomplish.

But the support for mounting a cue/bin/iso-image stored (not compressed) in rar-files would be great advantage for many of the D-Tools users.

Here are the facts:
All ISO CD/DVD games and apps when released to the scene (by various release groups) are always stored in a cue/bin/iso image, which is then stored (not compressed, only stored) in splitted rar archives, .rar .r00 .r01 and so on. The size of these splits are usually 15 000 000 000 bytes (for cd cue/bin image) or 50 000 000 000 bytes (for dvd iso image).

Here is an example Locutus:
The brand spanking new GTA: San Andreas (which is sweet btw). Before the regular not rar/release-aware person gets to download his sanandreas.cue/bin from kazaa (ooh, that hurt :mrgreen it looked like this,
In a folder named,
Grand.Theft.Auto.San.Andreas-HOODLUM
There are these files,
hoodlum.nfo (info about the release group Hoodlum and install instructions)
hlm-gtasa.rar --> hlm-gtasa.r83 (50 000 000 000 bytes each for DVD image)
hlm-gtasa.sfv (simple file verification to be able to check that all the rars are correctly downloaded before attempting to extract)
Inside the hlm-gtasa.rar archive is the file hlm-gtasa.iso stored (again, not compressed). If this would have been a cd-release there would be a hlm-gtasa.cue/bin.

I guess/hope most people here recognize this, the release way =)

This is always the way ISO games and apps come out to the scene. If some peaple are not aware of this its because unfortunately many people like to extract all files from the rar-archives, rename the folders, cd-images and nfo/sfv-files and delete the rar-archives.

Anyway, I'm not that much for pushin this way onto everyone and do not feel I have to argument why I keep my files this way (original, untouched). Just knowing that its the best is enough for me
But I see that more and more people, just like me, are keeping their files this way, just like they were originally released.

So, to be able mount a cd/dvd-image stored in a set of rar-files would be a great advantage to all of us rar-users. We will not have to extract the rar-archive anymore, just to mount the single cd/dvd-image in d-tools anyway.

In a technical point of view I dont think it requires a lot of work, since the files are not compressed, only stored. I guess in the rar-archive there is some kind of index which points the stored file(s), and then comes the file(s), which is completely uncomressed. I would love to see this feature become reality and would like to help out as much as possible.

I understand that the development team might feel that this is pretty much warezy. But I also realize that even though d-tools might be legal, I guess a very high percentage of its users have it to be able to install/use copyrighted software which they do not have a license to.

Locutus, if you guys ever consider this feature, feel free to email me about it and I will gladly help wherever possible.

Thanks again for this great software!

[Copytrooper]

I think we don't need such "suggestions" :roll: