I followed the tutorial to open my extract in STATA. STATA read the do file, but after using `“usa_00002.dat”’ command a red message saying record too long appeared. When I went to browse data, there were only 29 observations. I know for a fact this extract has over 25 million observations. What happened to all the other observations? How can I open all 25 million observations in STATA?
I downloaded your extract and was able to open it using Stata/SE 12.1. The first thing I would recommend is to re-download the data file and unzip the file again (if you are on Mac you can simply double-click the zipped file and it will automatically decompress the file. If you are using Windows you need to use a program like 7-zip). Some times errors in the decompression process can cause odd truncation of the data. Since your data file is so large the decompression process can take a few minutes, make sure you wait until the file is complete before you try to use it.
I hope this helps.