Expert: Paul Jordan - 1/16/2009

Question
AutoCAD 2006.

AutoCAD just gave me a very ominous error message, and now I can't even open the drawing file I was working on. Here is the error message below:

"WARNING: 122524 errors were found during open. We recommend that you cancel this open and run RECOVER on the drawing. Would you like to cancel this open?"

Not really, but OK, so I clicked YES and this message came up:

"Unable to open this drawing. It contains incorrect or corrupted information. The RECOVER command may be able to restore undamaged material from this drawing."

So I ran RECOVER and it didn't work. Needless to say, this is a project I have been working on for about six months and was about to send it to the printers tomorrow.

My other drawing files appear fine. This particular project has a fair amount of outside data (other CAD files imported from the landscape architect, surveyor, etc.) and is quite a large file. Should I start looking for another job?

Thanks,

Shaun  

Answer
Hey Shaun,

All is not lost.  Just find the .bak file with the same name or something very similar to it.  It might be in the same directory the actual .dwg file is stored in.  Go into windows explorer, click on it, then right click and select rename.  Just change the file extension (.bak) to .dwg.  All you've lost is from the time it was last saved.

I wouldn't sweat trying to figure out what's wrong with the file you've been working on.  With the several million lines of code, you could spend years trying to figure it out.  The guru's at Autodesk will sometimes run a program or two on it to try and recover it but, in my time as an application engineer for Autodesk, it's always been better to just go back to the backup file.

Hope that helps.

Paul