Recovering a 2008 model from Archive

[ldecastilhos]

Hi,

I've been trying to recover a file (AutoCAD 2008) with the "Recovery Toolbox for DWG".  It ran all day yesterday only for it to tell me it could not be recovered.  Does anyone know of any other 3rd party recovery software that might have a better shot at recovering the corrupted file.

[Patchy]

What size of the .dwg? does it look like same size as your normal .dwg?

Drag and drop it in an empty .dwg and see if it works.

or open it with notepad and see anything in it, if it's kind of empty then it's toasted.

[ldecastilhos]

There are actually a hand full of files (largest one is 271kb).  I just tried dragging and dropping one of the files and it said that the file "was created in an incompatible version of AutoCAD".  Opening the file in Notepad showed a bunch of, I believe, Chinese characters.  Thanks for the help.

[Patchy]

Looks very small, probably corrupted.

Any .bak in there?

Attach it here (If your office let you upload)

[ldecastilhos]

No .bak files unfortunately. 

[pendean]

@ldecastilhos ZIP up these files and post that one ZIP file here for someone to try them out for you: 271kb is almost nothing, what do you think is inside these files if I may ask?

And "...was created in an incompatible version of AutoCAD..." means nothing, it's a marketing gimmick by Autodesk.  Is that all that is stopping you from using the content if the drag/drop or INSERT option worked to reveal the content?

[paullimapa]

Did you try after opening AutoCAD and typing in the command RECOVER to select and open one of those files?

[drdavisNYQSZ]

A couple of times I have seen whoever made the "archive" was, for some reason,  renaming a file from another program as DWG. I opened the DWG file in a text editor (Notepad++) and it did not have an AutoCad header. Tried renaming the file with extensions of a few other programs but none of them worked either. The file was no good and didn't spend anymore time on it.

[ldecastilhos]

Yes, tried that, didn't a whole lot of anything, thus why I was trying to use a 3rd party recovery application. Good call though. Thank you.

[ldecastilhos]

Thank you to everyone who gave suggestions.  It seems like the file is toast at this point and we're not going to spend more time on attempting to recover the files.