Participant

Answered

I cannot open FLA files in CS5 "UNEXPECTED FILE FORMAT" help!

Forum|Forum|15 years ago
June 12, 2010
14 replies
66415 views

I am in desperate need of someone's help. For the second time I cannot open 2 FLAs that I have more than 100 design hours invested. I'm running CS5 and need to find out what can be done? I am afraid to do anything with the fear this will happen again, I have got to open these files and finish the projects. How can this be done or what can resolve the issue.

I cannot believe ADOBE would release CS5 with such a serious problem. This is damn near life and death, these two files represent a $200k account.

PLEASE HELP! My name is Kevin and my email is km@bluhornet.com

This topic has been closed for replies.

Correct answer Sukhi12

Hi All,

Today we have released Flash CS5.5 update . This update contains fixes for opening and saving some Flash Professional files (FLAs) in CS5.5, and other bug fixes.

Please download Flash CS5.5 updater .

You Can download from Flash > Help > Updates .

Thanks
Sukhbir

S

Soulshoes-Gul6yg

Participant

I have just recovered a file for one of our students.

If you are running Windows, rename the file from something.fla to something.zip

Download this program http://www.diskinternals.com/zip-repair/ and repair the zip file.

Then rename recovered-something.zip to recovered-something.fla and it should now open.

S

Sudeshnasarkar27

Adobe Employee

Hi ,

I have written a blog post concerning Unexpected File Format issue , could you please see if the updater fixes the problems for you.

Thanks and regards,

Sudeshna Sarkar

Adobe Flash Professional Team.

schuetzg

Participant

I teach High School students game development basics using Adobe Flash. I have been doing so since the Macromedia days. Many of my students have gone on to pursue careers related to this instruction. Recently I have been using CS4. A few weeks ago, we upgraded to CS6. Since then, 6 students have lost 2 weeks of work due to the unexpected file format error. You have no idea how disheartening this is to a young person. I will go back to using CS4, and share this forum with my classes to show them that they are not alone. Apparently many professionals have faced the same disaster for many years.

F

FredFranco

Participant

I'm also still having the same problem here...

If this program is on a beta version why it was released?!?!

D

Damadarxx

Participant

Dear all,

I know that this is an old topic; however we are having a major issue with this.

Our version of Flash is fully up to date with the latest patch 11.5.1.349.

Yes we are using this software in a network environment and are saving to a network location. However we have started to save to memory pens which also seem to fall to this bug or design fault within Flash.

From being an educational establishment for security reasons giving students access to the actual computer is not advisable.

Is adobe going to look at making flash and other products more suitable working in a network environment? As you can imagine we are training our students to use your software now so that when they leave they are adapt and confident to continue using your software!

Has anyone found a work around for this issue?

We are thinking of deploying a virtual hard disk that the students can access which will be stored locally on each computer.

Will this help resolve this issue or get around it?

M

mmarez

Participant

Had the same problem, however using tips included in above posts I managed to work out a way to recover content of corrupt .fla files:

1. Open WinRAR
2. Select the *.fla file and click the "Repair" button and choose to treat the archive as a .zip file
3. WinRAR created rebuilt.*.fla file. Open it.
4. The file seems to work now, but generating swf may not work. From here you can just copy/paste the clips and code to new, empty document.

ShanPeñarubia

Participant

it worked! i thought its the end of my work.. but thanks to you. but how can i copy the scenes? for example?

R

rangel6693s983

Participant

:SOLUTION: Windows 7

Go to C:\Users\YOURUSERl\AppData\Local\Adobe\Flash CS5.5\en_US\Configuration

This place have some .FLA named TMPsgv1zqm92r or something.

Open ALL and find your pretty .FLA untouchable!

Then save and backup! and BE HAPPY

S

Sukhi12Correct answer

Participating Frequently

Hi All,

Today we have released Flash CS5.5 update . This update contains fixes for opening and saving some Flash Professional files (FLAs) in CS5.5, and other bug fixes.

Please download Flash CS5.5 updater .

You Can download from Flash > Help > Updates .

Thanks
Sukhbir

A

Anonymous

I am having the same problem. The zip repair solution did not work and the update doesn't work because I am using CS5 (not CS5.5).

I created my fla file yesterday - it's a simple drawing, was working on it today tried to save it and it wouldn't save - I tried saving to a different place - still wouldn't save. I closed it down and tried to reopen and have not been able to open ever since (I get the 'Unexpected File Format' error). I restarted my machine - installed the CS5 update, tried the zip repair solution.

Any other suggestions?

MarceloReborn

Participant

Maybe this can be useful to someone.

There are two patches for Flash CS5 which corrects that bug here: http://www.adobe.com/support/flash/downloads.html

A

Anonymous

I had the same Problem and found a solution that works for me.

First, copy your corrupted FLA into a new folder. Rename your FLA to [Your File].zip. Then Open that ZIP File with WinRAR and press Alt + R to repair the Archive. Extract the content of the fixed new ZIP file into another folder.

Now, open the "DOMDocument.xml" in Safari. In my case, Safari throws a XML Error. I opened that XML with an Editor and found a non UTF-8 Char at the Line where Safari throwed the error. I deleted that Char, saved the XML and opened the XFL File. Everything works fine.

Where did that non UTF-8 Char came from? In my case, i copied same Text from Powerpoint into a component property field. And everybody should know, that copied text from MS Products comes with a lot of garbage, that nobody needs. Flash saves your texts with that garbage in a xml and your FLA is coruppted.

A

Anonymous

the same issue here,
CS5 crashes and gives a message "UNEXPECTED FILE FORMAT"
new instal of CS5 on Windows 7 64 bit, good workstation,

stable network in a hi-tech company

it doesn't look like a plain corrupeted file, happens too often

it seems that Flash CS5 is less stable than the previous editions

W

Wertisdk1

Participant

Guess what. I just randomly stumbled upon this thread when my gf was experiencing problems with a .fla file created in Adobe Flash CS 5, on a Windows 7 64bit machine, which for no apparent reason started throwing the "Unexpected file format" error.

Some guy before me suggested that the file is indeed just a renamed archive (.zip)...

So... I renamed the file to [filename].zip, opened it in winrar and pressed ALT + R (tools -> Repair archive) after the winrar process had thrown an "Unexpected end of archive" error.

It then created a file named rebuild.[filename].zip, which i just renamed to rebuilt.[filename].fla and...

Presto! It works perfectly in Adobe Flash CS5 again.

I hope this information will be able to solve further problems for people with corrupted .fla files.

K

kuryaki

Participant

Hey Wertisdk1! I tried your ways with my particular corrupt fla. It didn't really worked, but it gave me a good idea, which in the end led me to recovering at least half of my "lost" work. 2 Days of hard frame by frame animation was in risk! Thanks!

So here's what I did, perhaps it can help some one. Took me a few tests and tries but in the end it was good. You can recover your lost SYMBOLS. Its a way of getting back all your project library into a new flash file. It goes like this:

1) I opened my corrupt fla file using Winrar. It shows a couple of folders and a few XML files, that can and will be opened later using notepad or word or whatever text editor.

2) I extracted all those files into a new folder with the name of my corrupted file. eg: c:\documents\corrupted.

3) Once 'decompressed', I opened the LIBRARY folder (eg: c:\documentscorrupted\LIBRARY\), in which all the symbols in my corrupted project are apparently stored as xml's. I backuped this files for later. This are my original symbols I want to be restored.

4) In Flash CS5, I started a new project, exactly the same size and specs of the corrupted one. Create a symbol in it and name it with some name you can remember, like recovery. Just any symbol, a graphic or a movie clip, whatever.

5) Once the project looked exactly as if I was going to start drawing all over again, I saved the file, with a new name eg: correputed_file_NEW.fla

6) I go and open this new 'correputed_file_NEW.fla' using again WINRAR and once again uncompress the whole fla into a new folder. eg: c:\documents\corrupted_file_NEW\

7) Go to that folder and open DOMDocument.XML using notepad, dreamweaver or whatever text reader you have. You'll see a long HTML code. Focus on the 7th or 8th line, you'll see <symbols> and then a list of the symbols in your fla, which in this case would only be that "recovery" we just created.

</symbols>

Also, in the Folder you have your correspondent LIBRARY folder, in wich you'll see 'recovery.xml' (c:\documents\corrupted_file_NEW\LIBRARY\)

8) Now its time to get your backup symbols from the corrupted file, the symbols I want to restore, and copy them into the Library folder of my "correputed_file_NEW.fla" (c:\documents\corrupted_file_NEW\LIBRARY\), without deleting 'recovery.xml'.

9) Go back to DOMDocument.XML on your text editor. Now you need to add the name of every symbol restored. The same way you see here (recovery files named bass1, bass2 and so on):

Once done, Save changes on DOMDocument.XML

10) Goto the folder c:\documents\corrupted_file_NEW\, select all this files and folders and "compile" them again using Winrar. This is done by selecting them all, right click and "add to archive..." OR straight from Winrar, look for the files, highlight them and click on 'ADD'.

11) Name your file 'recovered project', Choose ZIP as 'File Format'. MAKE SURE you cahnge the name from 'recovered project.ZIP' to 'recovered project.FLA'.

12) Click ok and watch your fla get compiled again.

13) Open this new recovered project.fla using Flash and wow!

In my case, I recovered all the symbols in which layed a lot of the work I almost lost during the file corruption! I still have to start overall the timeline work, but when everything seemed lost, this helped me a lot!

Sorry for my english, is not my native language. I hope my instructions made sense and I helped out somebody.

Having a corrupt fla is a pretty horrible thing to have. Specially when you obviously didn't made a backup of the file, obviously! And see with horror hours, days or weeks of work just die... or worse! Stay in coma!

Good Luck!

A

Areron

Participant

I am also using CS5 flash at work with windows 7. I quickly learned to save multiple versions of the same file. It is still incredibly annoying to have it crash while saving and corrupt my files 6 or 7 times a week and I still lose work. Flash CS5 is inexcusably unreliable and buggy. Please come up with a solution to this problem as soon as possible. It is interfering with my productivity at work.

Show more replies

Sign up

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Sign in to Adobe Community

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Scanning file for viruses.

This file cannot be downloaded