HELP on Quark Express 4.01 File will not open

[pablopablo]

Please please I hope someone can help me my home XP crashed on me when I was working on a very important quark file, now when I click on the file to reopen ir it has got an extension next to it .ASV.qxd and when I click on it to open it it says "This file is not a valid quark express file or it has an incorrect file extension. [9].
Can I get all my hard work back. I have another file of the same work and when I click on this it says auto save on this document was interupted by a systems failure click OK and when I do it says Unexpected end of file encountered [39]..... Please HELP...

 

[pobajo]

These files are probably lost/damanged for good. Another message that comes up might be "bad file format".

I understand Markzware at one time had something to help recover the file. I don't recall the name of the product. I used it once many years ago and I was able to recover most of the document, but there was some cleaning up to do. Try calling them and talk to them personally.

Paula

 

[Typesetter]

The first simple thing you can do is try manually changing the extension to just .qxd -- get rid of the ASV. If that doesn't work, open Quark and then try to open the file from within quark. If that doesn't work and you keep getting "unexpected end of file encountered", usually you're screwed. However, Paula was correct. Up through Quark 4, Markzware had a program that is supposed to be able to fix just that. I don't believe they went past version 4 though.

Good luck -- but I recommend NOT using the autosave in the future. This automatically saves your document at intervals that you set in your preferences (every five minutes, etc.). It can suddenly stop your work to save and can be very annoying. It's better to use Auto Backup. You make a folder somewhere (just call it Quark Backup), and tell it how many revisions you want to save. It saves a copy of the entire document every time you MANUALLY save the document. Let's say you tell it to save 5 revisions, it will save the the most recent 5 and then overwrite the older revisions as it goes. I like to use 3 revisions, and it has saved me many times. Because that end-of-file problem can have started out in your last revision file somewhere, and you may need to go back a couple of revisions. DRAWBACK: that backup folder can get full pretty quick, you need to go through it and trash stuff once and a while.