Greg Briggs' Technical Articles

Recover gzip files from Tektronics Scopes

Tektroniks digital oscilloscopes that we have here an ECE dept of University of Rochester, make corrupted gzip files sometimes. Fortunately, you can recover them, by just cutting off the gzip header. Here is how, shown for the case of a PNG file. It looks like the file was not actually compressed at all.

We need to cut off the GZIP header. Open the gzip file with a hex editor. See where it says TEK00001.PNG blah blah PNG? You want to keep the second PNG including one character just before it (hopefully the percent symbol, ascii 0x89, because PNG files normally start with %PNG). All done!