PA 21.00.18 running on Windows 7 64 bit.
I made a big .PA file and thought I’d check it was made correctly with Menu / Actions / Test.
Discovered:
a) PA always issues a UAC prompt to do this!
b) PA always says there are many errors in PA files.
WinRAR 5 has a rather useful option in some cases, which is to be able to create an archive by replacing identical files with a reference to the first occurrence (hardlink) within the archive.
In case you choose to convert the file with PowerArchiver to another format, however, the resulting archive does not have all the files. It does not consider those that were present as hardlinks.
If you do a normal extraction of the RAR archive instead, even with PowerArchivier, all the files are extracted correctly.