Recover DAR Archive Slices using an Isolated Catalogue

Question

I have a DAR archive of 10 slices. Having lost the last slice, how can the files in the 9 intact slices be recovered. (The catalogue of the whole archive is contained in the last slice.)

There is a similar question:

Recover incomplete DAR archive

The difference is a separate isolated catalogue is available in my case.

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DAR Tutorial says:

Second, we can use the isolated catalogue as backup of the internal catalogue if it get corrupted. Well to face to data corruption the best solution ever invented is Parchive, an autonomous program that builds parity file (same mechanism as the one used for RAID disks) for a given file. Here we can use Parchive to create a parity file for each slice. So, assuming you lack Parchive, and that you failed reading the full backup because the usb key is corrupted in the part used to store the internal catalogue, you can use an isolated catalogue as rescue:

dar -x linux_full -A /root/CAT_linux_full ...
dar -d linux_full -A /root/CAT_linux_full ...
dar -t linux_full -A /root/CAT_linux_full ...
dar -l /root/CAT_linux_full

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Command line output:

C:\dar64-2.6.5>dar.exe -x "/cygdrive/d/theArchive" -A "cygdrive/d/theCatalog"
The last file of the set is not present in file:///cygdrive/d , please provide it. [return = YES | Esc = NO]
Continuing...
The last file of the set is not present in file:///cygdrive/d , please provide it. [return = YES | Esc = NO]
Escaping...
Final memory cleanup...
Aborting program. User refused to continue while asking: The last file of the set is not present in file:///cygdrive/d , please provide it.

I'm in Windows and apparently, DAR requires cygwin paths as mentioned above. (I'm not much familiar with either dar or cygwin)

dar seems to ignore the isolated catalog and refuses to give-up looking for the last slice. So, I duplicated the 9th slice and renamed it as the 10th. Still the same response as above.

I really hope someone can figure this out. Any command line arguments would be very much appreciated!

Answer 1

After digging through mailing-lists of DAR project, it turns out adding --sequential-read can prevent DAR from getting stuck requesting for the missing slices.

C:\dar64-2.6.5>dar.exe -x "/cygdrive/d/theArchive" --sequential-read -A "/cygdrive/d/theCatalog"
theArchive.10.dar is required for further operation, please provide the file. [return = YES | Esc = NO]
Escaping...
/cygdrive/z/Image11.jpg not restored (user choice)

Most of the files of the archive were recovered!

However, a recovered file was corrupted - probably a file spanning into the missing slice.