could not be open the file because it is either not a supported file type or the file is damaged

[Ryan22462188sy9l]

sometimes when i'm trying to open pdf files from my USB, it gives me a message saying Adobe Acrobat Reader "could not be open the file because it is either not a supported file type or because the file has been damaged".

strangely, this has also happened when i tried downloading an Excel version of a PDF. i fully scanned my entire USB with my Norton Antivirus, where i was told i had no virus in there, and also tried uninstalling then reinstalling Adobe Acrobat Reader yesterday. for some reason, it seems to mostly happen with PDFs possibly larger than 1000KB, though i did get the same message when i tried opening a PDF at around 600KB. even stranger, when i tried downloading PDFs larger than 1000KB from a website whose name i can't remember right now, they opened up just fine. these files seem to open after i download them but, in most cases, when i eject my USB and then put it back in, they throw error messages saying they can't open.

could someone please help me figure out what's going on so i can download and view PDF files properly that are above 1000KB without these error messages?

[try67]

Reader can't open XLSX files, or any other format, except for PDF. Use Excel.

[Ryan22462188sy9l]

that doesn't quite answer my questions regarding the other error messages with the PDF files, as i have detailed in the above message and in the images i provided

[try67]

Open these files in a plain-text editor (like Notepad). What's the first line you see there?

And the file-size has nothing to do with it. PDF files can be much much bigger than 1MB...

[Ryan22462188sy9l]

from what i can see when i view the Notepad for the PDFs that actually do open up without any sort of error messgae, it looks like i'm normally supposed to get something like %PDF-(1.3-1.5) on the first line. when i opened the PDFs with error messages in Notepad, i either get a blank Notepad file or it crashes since they won't respond.

this also doesn't appear to be exclusive to just these files alone, but rather any large PDF file that i download and view or possibly any PDF that i download, at least as far as i can guess regarding Notepad.

like i said, i don't know what is going on but i've never had any sort of problem with downloading and viewing these types of large PDF files until recently

[try67]

Sounds like a hardware issue with your USB drive.

[Ryan22462188sy9l]

i'm not quite certain why there would be a hardware issue. in the images i provided above, i fully scanned my USB multiple times with my antivirus and found absolutely no viruses. furthermore, my USB was not even anywhere near maximum capacity as it only had around 8% of it's space taken up in total.

i don't quite understand what could be wrong with it when it should be working just fine, at least theoretically

[Ryan22462188sy9l]

actually wait, after retracing my footsteps, i remember a few days ago that i just downloaded a huge ZIP file (1.05GB) containing a collection of all my photos from my Gmail account and then i started seeing these error messages pop up whenever i opened these PDFs shortly after. once i extracted my ZIP file to a folder and then deleted the ZIP, all those PDFs started working again, even after i safely removed my USB and then opened them again after putting the USB in, which would usually be when they crash

as incredibly relieved as i am to see the PDFs working again, i don't understand how it was my large ZIP file that was the cause? i scanned the entire breadth of my USB drive and found absolutely nothing. and it couldn't have been because the ZIP was large because i had other ZIPs that were even larger than that one and my PDFs worked just fine before. so why would all my PDFs start working again as soon as i deleted that particular ZIP file?

[try67]

My guess is there are some bad sectors on the drive. Try running Windows' Error Checking tool on it and set it to automatically fix such sectors.

[try67]

This issue has nothing to do with viruses or drive capacity. Any storage device can suffer hardware failure, where all or some of the sectors in it become inaccessible.

[Bernd Alheit]

Can you copy the file from the USB drive to a local drive?