Last time I looked, the downloader uses a proprietary multi-part archive format…. This way the download can continue if interrupted. I didn’t mess around with it enough, but most of the archive tools I used wouldn’t open it in any meaningful way. Never tried to combine them all and see if it was some kind of image or partition archive known at that point.
The first file you can open in whatever archive program you use… 7-zip is good for this… there are only a few files in it, the other archive files cannot be opened individually.
I tried a simple link to the files, into a single file with whatever archive extension you like (I chose 7z). You see all the files and the directory structure at that point. On Windows I just use HxD, I was looking at files anyway, and it has a basic split and merge tool… can load cygwin, or something similar if you want the command line… or use the command copy /b with a list of files (although it can be tricky, the way the operating system handles filename order on the command line, you’ll spend a lot of time fiddling with this, even to get a list of files to passed through a script or long for statement on Windows).
MacOS should have the concatenate (cat) command, as in Linux. maybe some gui for that, but I don’t use macOS much. HxD allows you to reorder the files, before combining them, if you’ve taken them out of order for any reason.
Basically, you’ll need a tool that can combine binary files into a single file. 7-zip (or other archiving tools) do not see all the files in all multipart archive files, it is not in a format with the file title and index that these programs want to see in a multipart archive format, so which will not see anything after the first file as an archive file. Never tried tar, but if 7-zip doesn’t like it, tar probably won’t. The result – one cannot simply use an archive tool to restore all files easily.
the archive files will be in a randomly named sub-folder within the folder where you specified the downloads should be – this is a setting in the maps download application.
doesn’t seem to be hardcoded – you can just combine them into one big file – name it whatever and put a name like mapupdate.7z
after combining them, with the concatenate command inside HxD, into a file called test.7z. NOTE: the file structure is a Harman Gen 3.1 update, but the program is the same as using 2020 and above. Same archive snippets, different file results at the end.
which I suppose would speed up the writing process – you’re not combining the files and then writing. I did not do a file comparison between the files after merging and writing to a thumb drive with the map updater to verify.
the map data file itself will be large, so a good backup program that can resume copying a large file might be a good thing to use if it gets interrupted for some reason.
also, you don’t get whatever verification the map downloader software is doing, so hopefully the merge and copy preserve the integrity of all the files. Take one out of commission, you’ll waste time.
