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Can't Open Pagemaker file! Help Please!

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magazineman

Technical User
Mar 20, 2003
3
SA
My wife recently scanned dozens of photos and placed them on 15 pages of Pagemaker 7.0 for future use in our magazine. When she went to place the last few photos the system froze.
We are using Mac G4, with OS 9.2. over 300+meg of memory.She had saved it along the way many times.

We rebooted, opened Pagemaker again and attempted to open the file. Message: Open last saved or most recent.

Last saved freezes my machine, most recent does nothing. I have discovered the file is 99 megs (big). Couldn't transfer to a Zip, so I burned a CD of the file and tried to open it on another machine. No luck. I waited an hour on the original machine thinking the size could be the problem. No luck.

If I can open it, I can take half of the file and make it at least workable. It represents 6 hours of her work and I would like to be her "hero". Any ideas? Forever indebted.

magazineman
 
Be her hero by telling her not to embed images in future documents. Making a large PM document with embedded images makes it more susceptible to corruption (the bigger they are, the harder they fall...).

Instead, link images. This keeps your PM document size much smaller.
 
Jimoblak,

Appreciated your immediate comeback and suggestion to use "links" in future. We will certainly look into that.

However, you failed to answer my question as to what, if anything, I can do now to retrieve and open the file.

Six + hours of work is resting in that file and I would hope there is something I can do to recover it.

I am going to atempt to allocate an abnormal amount of memory to Pagemaker in hope that it might encourage the opening of the file. It appears that Pagemaker, is overwhelmed by the 99 megabyte file size and that might help. If it works, I will post the results in hope that it might help someone else in the future. Any other suggestions?

Thanks again, really do appreciate your comments.

"magazineman"
 
Sorry - I tried not to the bearer of bad news in my last post. I cannot offer any suggestion for corrupted files. It is most likely lost.

The RAM allocation might help but it is not likely.

If the computer froze just before the crash, see if there is a temp file hiding somewhere.

The best option is to start over and backup work.
 
Your guys are great! I am very happy to report a success story. If you remember, the file size was 15 pages and a huge 99.5 megs. I couldn't transfer it to a Zip and made a CD of the file.

In a last ditch attempt to open the file and try to recover some part of the 6 1/2 hours of my wife's work, I decided to allocate 256,000K of memory to the Pagemaker instead of the 32,000+ which it showed as a recommended preffered memory allotment. I have a total of 354 megs of memory available on my Mac G4. I closed all my other applications leaving only the finder and Pagemaker 7.0 open.

Amazingly as it asked if I wanted to open "Last Saved" and I said yes, in almost instant response, the file opened!

This leads me to believe that many times in cases like mine, the file is not contaminated or corrupt (at least not the last saved version) and could be a memory problem.

I got to be a "hero for a night" at my house and it felt great.

Thanks again to all those who pointed me towards help. Hope my outcome will encourage others to examine all avenues before giving up.

magazineman
 
Hi, magazineman

> This leads me to believe that many times in cases like mine, the file is not contaminated or corrupt (at least not the last saved version) and could be a memory problem.

Thanks for letting us know all is well.

> Amazingly as it asked if I wanted to open "Last Saved" and I said yes, in almost instant response, the file opened!

Aha!! So the file wasn't saved properly last time!

Enjoy your hero status.

Iechyd da! John
18:41 25/03/033 GMT
 
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