The legend

For years the story told was that yt2.rar disappeared because of a legal notice, or a seizure, or someone's deliberate act. None of the three.

The fingerprint

The post "倚天2龙驹原版服务端 - metin2 server" by rain (9/23/2009) states the file's name and size. F Two things can be read without opening anything. The bytes: 155,567,047. F And the MD5 fingerprint, written in a period metadata field accompanying the file: that this field really is the MD5 is proven by construction through the twin field of game.tar.gz, published in Hong Kong on 10/6/2009, which matches the verified MD5 of the file we hold. F So bb0f21f864f8222c60350b54f9df243c is the fingerprint of yt2.rar, known without ever having seen it.

No known copy

That fingerprint matches no known file. F No archive holds a copy of it.

Why

The Chinese file-sharing service rain had put it on had an architecture publicly described by its own designers in 2009. F That description documents the deletion policy: large, rarely requested files were automatically removed. A 148 MiB archive requested by a few dozen people was doomed by the platform's own design.

The file everything was born from wasn't killed. It died because nobody cared about it anymore, while the game it contained spread across half the world: whoever wanted a server took the 639 MB "一键" (one-click) package, not the bare original.

The count that doesn't add up

We know what was inside, by subtraction. yt2.rar weighs 155,567,047 bytes; game0901.tar.gz weighs 142,394,597. That leaves 13,172,450 bytes for everything else. A RAR doesn't compress .tar.gz files further (they're already deflate-compressed), so the other tarballs, all together, had to fit in 12.5 MiB. lib.tar.gz (a handful of libraries) and mysql.tar.gz (the data of a freshly initialized database) fit. ports.tar.gz, the 2009 FreeBSD ports tree, weighed 45-60 MB: it doesn't fit. I

The "mysql, ports, lib" list the scene repeats as the contents of yt2.rar doesn't come from yt2.rar: it comes from a 2022 Polish listing, whose copies Exynox found tampered with (internal dates of 2017 and 2022), and with sizes "that didn't add up, no matter how you fixed them." F He writes this himself, with the honesty of the word "probably." That list is the content of the distribution as it recirculated in Poland, not the inventory of the 2009 Chinese archive.

What remains

An empty display case with a label saying what it held: name, bytes, MD5, date. And a single copy declared to exist, "corrupted," in the hands of a Chinese scene user who calls it by its real commercial name, 梦回倚天2（新区2）.rar, and who has never shared it. T We don't need the file; the MD5 alone would settle the matter in one line.