File data are corrupt. Archive may be damaged after creation. In this case it is sometimes possible to repair it if it has the recovery record. It also could have been broken while creating, due to hardware failures (usually caused by an over-clocked CPU or unreliable memory). In the latter case the recovery record will not help. The only way to detect if the repair will help is to try to apply the repair command to the archive and test the results. Check, if you have installed the recent version - if not, please download the actual WinRAR/RAR version from here. We always improve all functions with every update.

The size of a RAR archive, as well as the size of any single file within a RAR archive, is limited to 8,589,934,591 GB (9,223,372,036,854,775,807 bytes). Note that to create archives larger than 4 GB, you need to use NTFS, as older file systems do not support such large files. The size of a ZIP archive, as well as the size of any single file within a ZIP archive, is limited to 2 GB.

Older WinRAR versions (< 2.90) don't have the improved compression methods found in WinRAR 3.0 and above. Either a RAR 3.0 archive is being unpacked by RAR 2.8 or older or a ACE 2.0 archive is being unpacked by WinRAR 2.8 or older. In this case please update your old WinRAR/RAR version to the actual release.

RAR encryption does not contain backdoors, so the only possible way to find a password is to test all possible character combinations. Remember that if you lose your password, you will be unable to retrieve the encrypted files, not even the WinRAR author is able to extract encrypted files.