Hi, I’m a bit embarrassed to be making such a simple post, but I was hoping someone who’s used Anna’s Archive before might be able to tell me if I’m making a simple mistake somewhere. I’m trying to get a copy of a textbook for a friend, and it is showing on AA, but when I download the file, it comes without any file type. AA is listing it as a PDF so I tried just adding the extension but no dice. After that I found a reddit post suggesting a similar issue from just 3 days ago, and they had tried uploading the file to chat GPT and were able to get it to repair the file partially. I tried that same and got the same result, it fixed the first 200 or so pages, but nothing after that. AA is indicating that they scraped the file from Internet Archive, but searching for the file on there isn’t giving any results so I can’t get it directly from IA. I would just assume it’s a booked file (which it very well might be) but the fact that the first 200 pages were recoverable makes me think it might still be in there somehow. If at all possible could anyone with experience using AA advise? (Also I’m specifically leaving out the title because I don’t want to break any rules, and to be clear, I’m not looking for someone to download it for me, just trying to understand if I’m doing something wrong)
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Probably not much anyone can do without the file in question, and I think the community rules don’t allow that?
Try opening it in the browser. Go to the address bar and put in
file:///C:/path/to/file(if you’re on Windows, which I’m assuming you are). Firefox should be smart enough to recognize it as a pdf (if it indeed is) and open it, with or without extension. If it won’t open it, you’ll probably get an error message, which could shed more light on the problem.Is it a partial download? Sometimes with larger textbooks I’ll use JDownloader because my regular browser downloads will typically timeout.
I don’t believe it is a partial download. I mean thats only based on the fact that there’s no ‘part 2’ and the file is only like 150mb, so I feel like there’s larger PDFs out there
If you have a Linux machine, have you tried poking it with
file? Alternatively you may try to match the first couple of bytes against the known magic bytes manually. Other than that it’s pretty hard to say for sure without the file itself.Fired up my uConsole and took a look. It is showing as a PDF document, version 1.5, 1028 pages (which matches up with what chat GPT tried to spit out). It’s weird that it’s recognized as a PDF but it somehow isn’t
Have you tried a different browser?
Only tried Firefox so far, but when I try to download it straight through the browser the download times out and fails. I downloaded gopeed since it was recommended on AA and that is how I was able to complete the download
Have you tried using a different download server?
Yes, I’ve tried multiple of their slow but free servers, all of them give the same result. Also all of them download a file of the exact same size, so I’m fairly confident that they’re downloading the same file regardless of which server you use
If you’re into Docker containers at all, I just set this one up last night and it does work, eventually. I don’t know if it would fix your problem, but it fixed mine with downloading anything at all.
What docker container? One for AA? Or a downloader?
I’ve been on lemmy long enough to have heard of docker containers, but I have no idea what they are XD I was having issues where my download speed would drop to 0 but eventually was able to get the file itself downloaded, so I’m not sure getting the file is the issue, it’s more that opening the file isn’t working as I would expect
