Software·43,928 discussions

PDF repair? Nothing working

Tags: Windows

Hi, hoping someone can suggest something please.

I was transferring PDFs from one laptop to another using a new USB pen.

Something went disastrously wrong. I don’t know what the pen did, but the files are unopenable.

I’ve tried as much as I can, and nothing will read or repair them.

It’s bizarre, because the PDFs look normal in the folder, with all their proper file sizes, but they just will not open.

It’s a loss. There are about 350 files, and I don’t have access to the source any more to replace.

The files do unfortunately seem to be garbage, but any advice would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Dene.

Topic

Could it be this simple?

In reply to PDF repair? Nothing working

Are you using the same app on the new laptop?

Also, as evidenced in thousands of prior discussions, you never MOVE files. You copy them so you don’t destroy your last copy.
Also you keep backups of what you can’t lose.

Finally, PDFs are rarely the last version of the document. For me I have my documents in Word or LibreOffice and create PDFs from there. Maybe there’s more story about where the PDFs came from but if you lost them, then you go get them again from the same sources.

Re: pdf

In reply to PDF repair? Nothing working

I opened a random pdf-file (“C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Acrobat Reader DC\Resource\ENUtxt.pdf”) in Notepad. The first line is:
%PDF-1.3

If you see something else, it most likely isn’t a proper pdf-file. Now copy another pdf-file to that same new stick, check if it’s exactly the same size, and has exactly the same content. If there’s is any difference, possibly something is wrong with that new stick.

Recovery seems impossible.

Try Sumatra

In reply to PDF repair? Nothing working

When I read that .PDF files were no longer going to be supported by MS, I found an open-source software called Sumatra that works really well. Maybe it’s the fact that some platforms no longer support .pdf?

Where did you read that MS is dropping support for pdf?

In reply to Try Sumatra

I have seen nothing about that, pdf can even be viewed in Microsoft Edge browser (newer versions).

Must be that old news about the “Reader App.” – 2017?

In reply to Where did you read that MS is dropping support for pdf?

Old news.

Thanks for your reply

In reply to Where did you read that MS is dropping support for pdf?

wizard57m_cnet ~ True. I thought about my post later that it wasn’t as clear as it should have been. It’s been so long since I switched to Sumatra that I couldn’t clearly remember the reasons, but as rproffitt pointed out in the post below yours, it was probably the reader app losing support I was reacting to. I like stand-alone apps, if I can find them, without having to rely on a browser.

PDF repair

In reply to PDF repair? Nothing working

Download, install, and run the DEMO version of Recovery Toolbox for PDF.
Select a damaged .
Run the analysis of the damaged PDF file.
Review the list of recovered objects in the program.
Select a version for a new PDF file.
Select the name for the PDF file for exporting the recovered data.

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