Restore a corrupt file?

[Steve Rickaby]

At 12:35 -0700 27/2/12, Tammy Van Boening wrote:

>Can you try the heroic open approach? In FM, create new empty file (you have
>to file a blank file open to use this command), then press, one after
>another Esc o H. In the File Open dialog box, select the bad file. If it
>opens, immediately save it as a .mif.

Pat said she'd tried 'open heroic' with no luck, Tammy. But your description of open heroic differs a bit from what I thought it was, so maybe hers does too and she didn't try it as you describe.

Are corrupted files a common issue with FrameMaker 10? I may be going there sometime soon (from 7). I know I'll be bringing the Furies down on me by writing this, but in 20 years, from v 3 to v 7, I don't remember a corrupt FrameMaker document.

What I *do* remember are files that FrameMaker refused to recognize as FrameMaker files because the opening '<MakerFile v.x>' in the binary, where 'v' is the FrameMaker version and 'x' is an uppercase ASCII letter (patch code?) had somehow gotten changed. Might be worth having a look at this with a binary editor. I am looking at files here with:

<MakerFile 7.0H>
<MakerFile 6.0J>

but have no higher versions to check.

These lines seem to always be followed by a blank line, but after that a FrameMaker doc goes into pure binary aside from the text, one line per para. At least the text could be recovered this way, if nothing else works.

-- 
Steve