Corrupt file: crash upon opening

[Meese Scott]

(Mac OSX; FMP 6)

One of our users had an FMP 6 file open when her computer crashed.

Now when we go to open the file, FMP just shuts down: we get the

splash screen and the password box, but when we enter the password

and hit enter, FMP closes and gives us the error message "The

application FileMaker Pro has unexpectedly quit"...

When I run the "recover" function, FMP looks like it's rebuilding records, layouts, and

indexes, then gives me this message:

"Recovery is complete. During recovery: 3381K bytes were salvaged;

0 whole records were skipped; 0 field values were skipped; 0 lost

filed definitions were rebuilt."

However, when I try to open the recovered file, FMP shuts down, just

like it did before.

Any suggestions on how to correct the problem or to extract the data?

Thanks.

[QuinTech]

Hi, Meese. It sounds as if there may be an opening script running; try entering your password, then immediately after hitting Enter, start hitting the Escape key until the file opens and you can edit it.

Or, for a more foolproof way of getting around it: Open a different fp5 file and define relationships. When you create a relationship to the afflicted file, FMP will open it without going through opening scripts. (You only need to go as far as selecting the file; you don't need to select a field to relate to.)

If, after using the second method, you still can't open it, then my intial theory is right out the window and we'll have to look for other problems.

HTH,

Jerry

[Meese Scott]

Jerry:

Thanks for the ideas. The first one didn

[QuinTech]

No way to convert from 7 to 6. But try exporting from the fp7 to a .mer file, and then import that .mer into the fp5. A .mer file is nothing but a tab-delimited text file, with the advantage that it includes field names for convenient matching later.

J

[Meese Scott]

SUCCESS! YOU SO TOTALLY ROCK!!

(

[Martin Brändle]

XML export and import is the clue. FMPXMLRESULT is the same for FM7 and FM6.

[QuinTech]

Scott, Martin's comment reminds me of something i left out: Exporting to just about any type of file will strip out all carriage returns and replace them with a different special character. If you have fields with returns in them, you'll probably have to manually replace them at this point.

J