multi dvd .rar

[kevkaos]

posted this in the unbuntu forum but maybe it should be here sorry for the double post

i have a set of dvds with .rar on them when it finishes extracting the first disk i get a error message saying cant find 47.rar this would be the first rar on the next disk, problem is i cant seem to find a way of directing it to the next disk, if i pop the disk out and put the next in in an try and extract i get error cant find 1.rat any help would be much appreciated

[Roxoff]

The quickest way to get around this is to copy all the .rar files from your dvds into a single directory on your hard disk and unrar them from there. As you have the files on a disk, you can delete the .rar files aferwards leaving just the content you were extracting in the first place.

[kevkaos]

hmmm could do that but its spead across 14 dvds

[jayd512]

I agree with Roxoff.
Having to do that for 14 DVDs may seem like a bit of a hassle, but it would be the simplest solution.

[kevkaos]

cheers guys, was just hoping there may be of been a quicker way,

[Roxoff]

cheers guys, was just hoping there may be of been a quicker way,

It probably is the quickest way. unrar would be pretty slow if it had to keep fetching the next block of it's archive from the DVD drive. It's quickest to copy them en-bloc to the hard disk and let the process that's going to read them little by little do so from there. HDD's are much quicker for short random reads than DVDs. Of course, if you want even quicker, then copy your rar files to an SSD, and unrar them from there, or unrar to a different physical HDD than the one you've copied the rar files onto.

[Rubberman]

I agree with the rest of the posters about this, having used rar/unrar and related tools for years. Copy them all to a hard drive and then unrar them there. Once the extraction is complete (hopefully you also have some par/par2 files for error correction) and successful, then delete the .rar files from the hard drive. Of course, this requires 2x disc space of the data set, but as I always like to say, "Disc Space - The Final Frontier"...