Recover Damaged Excel File Corrupted By Path/File Access Error

Hey guys,

I've recently been working on a Football Manager Simulator built within VBA. On Thursday, I ran a piece of code that initialized a userform and, searched and displayed, specific data from a sheet onto a selection of labels. After checking this piece of code worked, I closed the program window and went on Chrome for a couple of minutes. Upon returning to Excel, the error message "Path/File Access Error" was displayed. After clicking okay on the message, a lot of different error messages popped up repeatedly including the Path/File Access Error message (x50), a System Error &H8000FFFF message (x50), a message informing me that AutoSave had been disabled and a message informing me that Excel had tried to repair my document by was unsuccessful as the damage was to great. I then tried to click Save however this resulted in more error messages informing me that the document was corrupted and could not be saved.

In my frustration, I just shut my laptop screen, leaving all of the programs running, and decided I would deal with the issue when I was a little less annoyed. On Saturday, I reopened my laptop and attempted to click on the program which was still open but that caused it to immediately crash and close the Excel file. I then left the program alone out of frustration again. I then reopened a previously saved version of my program and the Document Recovery window appeared at the side of my screen with a copy of the file from just before the first error message had appeared. Trying to open the file however caused the Excel window to crash and become unresponsive. Eventually, after 20 minutes, I closed the Excel window and tried to open it again. This time there was an additional file on the Recovery list, alongside the corrupted file, dated 1st January 1601 so I'm not entirely sure what's happened there. I tried to reopen the recovered file again but the exact same thing (Excel crash, new recovered file dated 1601) happened again.

So far, I have been unable to reopen the recovery file and it would really help if anyone could give me any advice to help to try and get back into the file as I had not saved any of the changes I had made all day. Apologies for the long description, however, I'm just trying to cover all bases. Any tips on how to avoid encountering another Path/File Access Error again as well would also be greatly appreciated. From very quick research, I think it may have had something to do with the way I initialized the form but I'm not sure and my main priority is just getting back into the file.

Thanks

Hi there,

You've probably thought of this yourself, but have you tried opening the workbook without enabling the macros it contains?

If your installation already "knows and trusts" your workbook (and therefore does not give you the option of not enabling its macros), make a copy of the workbook (different name) and then open it - in this case the installation should allow you the option of not enabling its macros.

Just a thought!

Regards,

Greg M

Apologies for the delayed reply, thanks for the suggestion however I had already tried that and was unsuccessful. Ended up getting a friend to help who did a lot of weird things I can barely remember. Ended up zipping the file, unzipping it and converting it from a .xlsm to a .xlsb. However it was fairly successful as I was able to recover most of the program. Thanks though