p7zip E_FAIL when uncompressing

Problem

Uncompressing a multi-part zip file on Linux using p7zip throws the error "E_FAIL"

x@y:/media/z/../..$ 7z x ~/Documents/abc-2.0.zip.001

7-Zip 9.20  Copyright (c) 1999-2010 Igor Pavlov  2010-11-18
p7zip Version 9.20 (locale=en_GB.UTF-8,Utf16=on,HugeFiles=on,2 CPUs)

Processing archive: /home/x/Documents/abc-2.0.zip.001

Extracting  ...
...
...
Extracting  abc/def.vmdk
ERROR: E_FAIL  

Description

I have a linux box running Ubuntu 13.10 and it has a large multi-part zip file. Total size of compressed files >40GB; largest file >25GB; number of parts 80. I wanted to unzip this to a 128GB flash drive. As I was unzipping this I got the error E_FAIL. Doing some simple digging around solved this.

E_FAIL means "out of disk"; "unable to make a file of a certain size"; and other variants of that. Basically it struggled to output the uncompressed files to target disk. There are three main reasons for this:

1. You are looking at a compressed archive that is read-only, like a CD-ROM and you've asked -7zip to write to that. It can't do this so fails as if there is no disk space.
2. You are trying to uncompress to a drive with insufficient disk space.
3. You are trying to uncompress a large file to a file system that cannot support a file that large so it fails as if there is no disk space.

My problem was the brand new Flash drive was formatted to exFAT or FAT32 as it appeared to my linux box. Thus the big file (>25GB) couldn't be written above 4GB, which is the limit for FAT32.

Solution

I reformatted the drive in NTFS because it can handle >4GB files and the drive is going to be used on Windows. I re-ran the uncompress process and it worked.

SOURCES

Ubuntu Forums Post