I have a 46GB tar file containing an .img of an old partition. Unfortunately, it produces a 0-byte file when un-tar'ed.
The tar file was produced on linux, I'm on windows now. I have tried WinRAR, and tar (from unixutils).
Note: It was actually originally a tar.bz2, but apparantly bzip2 defaults to deleting the original archive when decompressing, so now all I have is the tar file.
Anyway, what can I do about it?
Can you untar it on Linux? If you don't have a convenient Linux machine, perhaps you could set up one on a virtual machine to try. I'm sort of assuming this backup is worth the effort.
Some older tools don't necessarily work properly with files greater than 4 GB in size. You may be running into this problem; it might be worth trying recent tools to see whether that helps.
Try to untar it on filesystem which can support size > 4 GB.
Run 'file x.tar' to see if it is acutally tarred or tar bzipped or something else.
You wrote bzip2 deleted original file. That means you should have .tar.bz2 and not .tar. Am I missing something here?
Uncompress on latest Linux, I have faced problems when files dont get uncompressed on windows but work fine on linux.