I corrupted XPS files by trying to open with Acrobat - how can I fix?

My account is an admin account but I tried it again anyways, deleted Acrobat AND deleted Adobe Reader. Still no joy.

Anyone have a magic wand?

I got "no integrity violations" on the first run. I'll try the repair install on Saturday --- it looks like it's going to be something I'll need some time with and I am having one of those weeks at work.

You wouldn't think I could make things worse but I did. I back up to one of those services (don't know if I'm allowed to name names) and thought I might be able to recover the files by doing a restore on a different computer. I bought a new laptop and started to do the restore and it said to "adopt" the other computer if I was recovering. I clicked "adopt"...the program started running and at the same time a pop-up came up explaining what adopting was all about. Half way down the page it said "Do not do this until you have restored..." WHAT?!?!? Why didn't they say that in the first place?!?!? Why couldn't they have had a pop-up that said "Hey numbskull, do you want to click Restore first because you're gonna trash your life for the second time in a week in about two seconds." I frantically shut down the computer and called the support desk for the back up service. They'll get back to me in a few days I suppose but it looks like I shot myself in the foot.

I'm getting very close to the part of the process where I accept the fact that I'll never see these files again.

I'll circle back over the weekend after I do the repair install and let you know if I had any success.

Status update -

I haven't tried the repair install yet. Frankly, I'm so burned out with this stuff right now --- I don't know how some of you ppl do this for a living. It's brain-draining.

The back-up service that I use is CrashPlan. I have to say, in all honestly, they are a very good service and the price is really affordable - $5 a month for a ton of data. I do think it would be a good idea to get that "adopt" button out of there but, hours later, I was thinking that is all outweighed by their service and other features of the backup. Someone contacted me within 12 hours of my raising the SOS flag (pretty cool for $5 a mo, eh?). He shared my desktop and showed me how I could restore from the date of my choice even though the laptop was being constantly backed up. It also ended up getting all my files transferred to the new laptop in record time, so that was cool too.

There are still DOWNLOADING files - . I don't know what that means. About 15% of my files are a mess. Some of the ones that were a mess before are somehow (weirdly) fixed. How some fixed themselves and some didn't is a conundrum.

I will try to get to try the repair install sometime this weekend.

My question at this point....with everything copied over to the new laptop (Win8 instead of Win7), do you think it would be worth it to try all the fix attempts again, and are the things that have been suggested specific to Win7 or will they work on Win8?

It's the files, not the computer. With all the files transferred to the new computer, some are of the weird "downloading" type and some are normal. In going through a lot more files, I see there are some jpeg files damaged as well. It is kind of bizarre to me that some of the ones that were corrupted on the old laptop are now fine on the new laptop. I don't think that is ever going to be solved.

One last trick I thought of is to run a deep scan on the old hard drive to see if I can recover anything that isn't corrupted. All of the files on that machine came from another laptop - I sent most via Pando and some via Dropbox. I deleted the zip files, so if I can recover them, there's a small flicker of hope.

If that works, great. If not, I'll get over it. I think I'll be backing up to both an off-site and an external from now on and doing a survey for any bizarre file types on a more regular basis so I can catch it sooner if I run into the problem again.

Thank you thank you THANK YOU all for the help with this!!

Britton30 said:

Just thinking, but I can't see how changing a file type's association would effect the file itself. I would have though by putting them on a "normal" PC they would have been fine. I might suggest you run some comprehensive scans on it.

Scans like virus scans? I never even thought to do that!