Pale Moon forum

I tried downloading and extracting the portable version of Pale Moon Unstable to two of my Windows laptops, but a number of the files in the archive fail to extract due to a vague "data error". I have not encountered this issue with the stable portable releases. Has anyone else run into this, or know what might be causing it?

Operating system:
Windows 7 x64
Windows 10 x64

Browser version:
Pale Moon v28.0.0a4 Portable, x64 and x86

Extraction tool:
7-zip 18.01 (Win7), 18.05 (Win10)

Have you tried re-downloading the archive? I verified the local archives with 7-zip and they are OK.

Are there hashes on the (beta) download pages?
(I don't think I saw any the other day when I was there.)

Linux download has a hash, but not the Windows downloads.

Moonchild wrote:Have you tried re-downloading the archive? I verified the local archives with 7-zip and they are OK.

I downloaded fresh maybe thirty minutes before my post, and tried re-downloading again just now. The extraction fails with the same errors.

Interestingly, if I try going through the context menu (Right-click, 7-zip, extract to...), I get different errors. I get the same errors using the "Test archive" option from the context menu:
What version of 7-zip did you use to do the verification?

Which file did you download?
Which location?
What is its' size?
What is its' hash, MD5 or SHA1 or SHA256 ?

The files should have the following hashes. I verified the EU mirror location was correctly uploaded. Which mirror did you download from?

palemoon-unstable-latest.win32.portable.exe a5dfd75dc44050e70fe480a62f9ffb29740c10a5e080c0745fea4a7495ec6696
palemoon-unstable-latest.win64.portable.exe b8a8f19cd0c336ab40e2d6a9441268f4af8a7bf33b3e91b20ce6acdedf08acfd

I believe I only tried US mirror #1. I didn't think about trying the other mirrors or checking the hashes. I won't be able to test anything for the next week or so, but I'll try the other mirrors and check the hashes when I am available again.

I'll just assume something went wrong with the upload to the US mirror then and will re-upload.

Just a quick follow up to this: I've tried the 64-bit unstable portable downloads from both mirrors on a different Windows 7 laptop with 7-zip 18.01. Both extracted and ran without a problem. Tomorrow I'll confirm this on the two laptops I mentioned in my first post.

I tried this again on the two laptops from my first post. The installer from the EU mirror extracts correctly on both, but the one from the US mirror still fails with the same issues. The SHA-256 hashes match for both downloads, so I don't think anything is messing with the download process. The only thing I can think of is that some security software is causing some issue with the extraction process, but I cannot find any indication of this.

The installer from the EU mirror works, so that's good enough for me until PM 28 is released on the stable channel.

Thanks!

The SHA-256 hashes match for both downloads

Describe your workflow.

You download, save to disk, check the hash, ...

therube wrote:

The SHA-256 hashes match for both downloads

Describe your workflow.

You download, save to disk, check the hash, ...

1) Download to C:\Users\<user>\Downloads
2) Right click file > CRC SHA* > SHA-256

*This context menu option is installed as part of 7-zip.

So you're saying that 2 files, with matching checksum checked AFTER being saved to disk, display different behavior depending on whether they are downloaded from the EU or US mirror?...

As far as I can tell, yes. It makes just as much sense to me as it does to you.

I just tested on a fourth Windows machine and both downloads extracted correctly. The last two computers tested do not run the same security software as the two that exhibit the problem, so I'm holding that software suspect. I have no hard evidence to back up my hypothesis, but there's nothing else I can think of that would interfere with extracting a zip file, and the security software is quite zealous.

It HAS to be something local because otherwise binary exact matching files should never display different behavior.
Perhaps the overzealous (as of yet unnamed) security software restricts execution rights based on the "mark of the web"? (ADS zone information to mark something was downloaded)

Check your RAM with memtest86+ overnight.

This is a common symptom of bad memory cells, and doesn't hurt to rule it out. If you do get errors then remove each RAM stick one-by-one until errors go away then you know which one is at fault and should be replaced.