Dealing with a corrupted self extraction file…

Recently I was confronted with a SharePoint 2007 problem (yes, they do exist) that caused me to dig deep in my bag of tricks to pull out information regarding a KB article that I had used in the past to solve the exact same AD FS / SharePoint integration issue. So off I went to http://support.microsoft.com to pull the KB article and pull down the appropriate Office 2007 patch.

It only took a few minutes to find trust old 970230. This article of course points to yet another support article to gain access to the hotfix which contains the cumulative update – 969413. So off I went to the self service portal to pull the patch down from Microsoft – quick, efficient, mostly sanitary and best of all, self service, what more could I ask for?

After a few moments waiting for the transfer to occur, I received notification from Internet Explorer 9 that the file had completed downloading and that it may not be safe to run a program that was directly downloaded from the Internet. I disregarded this, knowing the source and that I had specifically requested this file… so I double clicked it and much to my shagrin was greeted by Error Code 110 during self extraction. Not even greeted with a “Please give me your password” message… 😦

Bellevue, we have a problem, over.

The file extracted, but it was problematic and zero bytes for an executable never seems to work all that well when you’re trying to patch a productivity platform like Office 2007.

A few minutes later I was hitting up the SharePoint community on Twitter, asking the community if anyone happened to have access to it or a spare copy sitting on their hard drive.  Fortunately I received two quick responses, one from Todd Steele and another from Trevor Sullivan. And like that I was back up and running, applying the hotfix in my VM and testing it to ensure that it would remediate the behaviour of the issue faced.  Problem solved!  Amazing how the community can quickly work to help one another out.

But wait, there’s more!

A little while later, I received a note from Scott Hoag, mentioning that perhaps using 7 ZIP to reach around the self extraction tool would work.

Sure enough, using the extract using 7 ZIP functionality and I was prompted for password.  A few seconds later and I was the happy owner of 969413.

Thanks to all for the assists and for teaching me something new today with regard to 7 ZIP file extraction (as well as for providing a working copy from backup as well) 🙂