difficulty learning iso files

[molfranz]

I just spent the last few hours going through how these are supposed to work in order to use them with an emulator. From what I understand, there's supposed to be a primary file type that you extract when looking through these archives (I refer to them as such since none of them have been a single file by any stretch) and then refer the emulator to when you have it load the cdvd.
To be clear about what I've been looking at, the two iso files I've looked through have been very similar, so I'll talk about them together. They each have one rpk.bin and a system.cnf file, then a SLUS_211.13 in one and a SLUS_217.35 in the other. There are then several folders filled with .vp, .sif, .pcm, .pss, .irx files, and one .img file in each of them. I've extracted all of this into a folder and referred pcsx2 to the bin file, which results in something like this:

Image type = Audio CD
* CDVD Disk Open: DVD, Single layer or unknown:
* * Track 1: Data (Mode 1) (308976 sectors)

Closing plugins...
Closing SPU2
File not found.
Path: IsoFileSystem
(pxActionEvent) IsoFS could not find the root directory on the ISO image.(thread:EE Core)
Closing PAD
Closing GS
Plugins closed successfully.
Shutting down plugins...
Plugins shutdown successfully.

I've also attempted to compress these files together and rename the result into .iso (since the original files are extracted from a .iso file anyway) but that gives me the same response in the log. I'm at a complete loss at this point.

[deadlegion]

Sounds like you have actually extracted the contents of the .iso image to me. Make sure any archive program you use is not associated with image file types, this is a common mistake with winrar users (image files will be displayed with the winrar icon).

You should be using 7zip, it has the best compatibility with many archive types. And it's completely free.

[molfranz]

Thank you so much. Other threads I was looking at didn't seem to apply and I couldn't get winrar to stop extracting the file every time I clicked on it. 7zip actually seems to give me more control, I just can't seem to set it as a default over winrar now. It also made more sense over what I was looking at. I'm crossing my fingers that the files I run into aren't much more complicated. From what I've seen, they can require passwords you need to look up in included documents, and they can also require you to compress files into the original iso (really unsure about that one). Thank you once again.

[Zorlon]

file association is not important but if you realy want it just right click on the file and hit Open with > Chose default program... then select 7-zip and check always open with

Passworded compressed files sometimes, but if that is from here the thread that has the download will also have the password

No idea what you are talking about after that though.

[molfranz]

That was honestly my best understanding of what I read. What I originally read that seemed to pertain to my problem was this:
"If you extract it, and inside you see another .rar..... derp, extract it.... you can have a .rar inside a .rar.... If you see a .00 .01 or w/e, this means the compression was split into many files. You should find the .rar in the list, and right click
extract that one, and it will put them together and extract the single image. Though i think you can extract any of the ones there, and it will automatically put them together and extract the single image too."
I can really only imagine that they're talking about a specific scenario since extraction almost never combines files. I'm not even 100% certain that it does. It was enough to confuse me since I had an .iso inside of a .7zip and they were saying you should just extract everything though. In any case, I'm really not sure why I couldn't move it without extracting it the other night. Even when I tried to use copy, winrar would extract it before pasting it. It may just have to do with the selection of iso files or the improper use of commands within winrar to move the file. At least I can get it to work now.

There we are. Just ran into it. A rar file with about 40 .r01 .r02 .r... files attached. From what I can tell, these are pieces of the iso, but when I extract, I just get all of these files in a big clump. When I try to extract the iso from the rar file, it just says that the file is broken.

[Zorlon]

*.r## is just a slit rar file you just either extract via the 1st file in the series only or if it has a *.rar you extract via that instead

as a general rule you always extract via the first numbered file with all split archive types including the *.r## *.### and part##.rar types there are others also but the this rule applies to most with an exception example above

with a series like that never open the archive just right click on the first file and hit extract here or extract to, and never try extract from each of the files, every filer is read automatically

recommend 7-zip for that

[molfranz]

I was really confused by what you said in the last post at first. I got it to work once I extracted the folder before opening the archive and THEN extracted the first file in the archive from the extracted folder. After doing it, your post actually does make sense to me. I was just so fixated on extracting the iso that I kept trying to extract the rar files first. So ultimately thank you since the post is still very informative. This particular topic should be closed now. Thank you everyone.

[Zorlon]

Heh I guess it's not that easy to explain.