Corrupted World file please help!

Hi all

I run mush off a seperate external hard drive, and last night I was having some issues with the internet on my desktop so I wanted to switch to my laptop. I safely removed the drive, turned it off via its switch, and plugged it into my laptop. But lo and behold when I go to open my world file it said

"File does not have a valid XML signature"

and then

"Invalid file format"


I just got done finishing a script last night and I had a bunch of aliases and triggers which I didn't back up so it'd be awesome if I could somehow recover my information. I do have a file from April that I'm using but it still sucks to know that all that work is gone -_-

Anyways, any help or insight would be much appreciated

Forral

Firstly, and you know this now, I think: back up your settings often!

Secondly, you may be able to examine and repair the XML in any half decent text editor that supports XML syntax highlighting, preferably with some sort of "tidy" or "check validity" type of utility.

Thirdly, this isn't a bug report, just a problem a user is having with his files. ;)

As Larkin said, try opening the file in a text editor, like Notepad.

Look in the directory, see how big it is. I suspect it is zero bytes long, which is why it says "no signature" because that just tests the first few bytes.

I'm sorry, but if the file is zero bytes long there isn't much anyone can do, unless it happens to be in the Trash or something. Also a disk recovery program might recover it.

Thanks for the responses.

Thankfully, the file is not 0 bytes, its actually 100kb (102,400 bytes to be exact) and when I open it with Notepad++ it just has a bunch of boxes that say "NUL"

I am working on rebuilding my profile, which I guess is a blessing since it was very crowded and unorganized, and I will no longer rely on maintaining a single copy of the file.

Sounds like the directory is pointing to the wrong part of disk (as that part is just nulls or zeros). A file repair utility may find it.

See this post for a plugin I just wrote that will help you automatically back up your world file on a daily basis:

http://www.gammon.com.au/forum/?id=10565