.exe not compatible with 64 bit Windows after FTP download

Question

Sorry for my bad English; I’m German and only 14 years old.

I uploaded an .exe file from my 64-bit Windows computer to my FTP Server with FTP.exe (in Command Prompt). Before I did that it was working just fine. But after I downloaded it, it came up with the following error: "The file is not compatible with your computer." Before that, it came up with another error, something like "not compatible with a 64 Bit System."

I accidentally asked the question on Stack Overflow 2 hours ago, and some people answered that I have to active binary mode. When I do that with the "binary" command, I get an answer that the activation was successful, but it isn’t working anyway. The .exe looks identical after download, but instead of having the old icon it shows up the standard .exe icon. I do not want to use another FTP program like FileZilla or ncftp (I tried it with FileZilla, it isn’t working either, so I don’t think that FTP.exe is the problem here.

The commands I used + Output (maybe the translation isn’t correct, but I think you know what the output means):

C:\WINDOWS\system32>ftp myftpserver.com
Connection to myftpserver.com established.
220 Welcome to myftpserver.com, FTP server standing by ...
504 Unknown command
User (myftpserver.com:(none)): user
331 Hello user, your FTP account password is required:
password: password
230-Login successful, your current directory is /
230 34349 Kbytes used (3%) - authorized: 1048576 Kb
ftp> binary
200 TYPE is now 8-bit binary
ftp> get example.exe
200 PORT command successful
150-Connecting to port 61051
150 347.5 kbytes to download
226-File successfully transferred
226 1.648 seconds (measured here), 210.83 Kbytes per second
FTP: 355794 bytes received in 1.91 seconds 186.38KB/s
ftp>

What can I do?

Answer 1

I agree with @DanielB: the file probably got corrupted when you uploaded it, so the copy on the FTP server is corrupt, and there’s nothing you can do to fix it.  (Well, it might be possible, but it won’t be easy.)  As @SpiderPig suggests, if you still have the original file, you should upload it again (using binary mode).  If you don’t still have it, re-create it (if you can), restore it from a backup (if you can), or get another copy from the place where you got the file originally.

P.S. You say “The .exe looks identical after download”.  Have you tried going into cmd and running dir?  I expect that the new file and the old file are different sizes.  (The difference will probably be small, such as 1%.)