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The heart of the issue lies in the .cab file. Short for "Cabinet," this is a native Windows archive file format used for data compression and digital signing. In the era of CD-ROMs (which Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit 1998 utilized), game data was often too large to fit neatly on a single disc, or developers wanted to organize their assets efficiently.
The most common culprit in the modern era is a corrupted download. Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit (specifically the 1998 version) is an old game. The files floating around the internet have often been re-uploaded, re-compressed, and transferred across dozens of servers. If a single byte of data in a .rar archive is altered during a download (due to a connection drop or bad server), the extraction process may yield a damaged .cab file. When the installer tries to read the compressed data inside Data3.cab , it fails a checksum verification, resulting in a "Corrupt File" error. Data3.cab Need For Speed Hot Pursuit.rar
Let’s break down the root causes.