ANALYSIS FORENSIC ARCHIVE

Broken ZIP / Archive Inspector

Walks the central directory the way a real unzip tool would, falls back to a raw scan when it's corrupted, cross-checks every local header against it — and can actually decompress each entry to verify its checksum, not just confirm it exists.

Archive

Common error messages this diagnoses

If you're here because something threw one of these, this tool shows you exactly what's wrong and how much is recoverable:

  • "unexpected end of data" — (unzip) — the archive was cut off before the central directory could be read.
  • "End-of-central-directory signature not found" — the index at the end of the file is missing or damaged.
  • "The Compressed (zipped) Folder is invalid" — (Windows) — general structural corruption.
  • "Error: Corrupt data" — CRC error — an entry's decompressed content doesn't match its stored checksum.
  • "Cannot open file as archive" — (7-Zip) — the file isn't recognized as ZIP-based, or damage prevents parsing entirely.

What this tool deliberately doesn't check

No ZIP64 support — archives over 4GB, or with more than 65,535 entries, use extended fields this tool doesn't parse. No decryption — traditional PKWARE or AES-encrypted entries can't be content-verified (they'll show as unsupported). Legacy compression methods (Shrunk, Imploded, BZIP2, LZMA, PPMd) get structural checks only — content verification only actually decompresses Stored and Deflate entries, which cover the vast majority of real-world ZIPs. No spanned/multi-volume archive support.