A typical cookie structure (Python pseudo-struct):
File "pyinstxtractor.py", line 211, in openArchive raise Exception('missing cookie, unsupported pyinstaller version or not a pyinstaller archive (top)') The (top) refers to the – the extractor tried to seek to the beginning of the Table of Contents using the cookie offset but found invalid data. It's not a separate error, but a debug hint. Compute a checksum of the cookie region: python
INFO: Appending archive to ELF section .data DEBUG: Writing cookie at offset 0x... Compute a checksum of the cookie region: # "MEIPACK2" uint32_t len
python -m PyInstaller.utils.cliutils.archive_viewer your_program.exe If the cookie is only slightly corrupted, you can manually locate the archive. Write a small Python script to find MEIPACK2 and extract data. # length of cookie uint32_t toc_offset
pip install pyinstaller==4.10 Then use its built-in viewer:
from PyInstaller.archive.readers import CArchiveReader reader = CArchiveReader('your_program.exe') reader.extract('output_dir') Many users report seeing the word "top" in the error traceback:
struct PyInstallerCookie char magic[8]; # "MEIPACK2" uint32_t len; # length of cookie uint32_t toc_offset; # offset to TOC uint32_t toc_len; # length of TOC uint32_t pyversion; # Python version (e.g., 0x03090000 for 3.9) char package[64]; # name char unused[16];