another instance of: Adobe InDesign may not support the file format, a plug-in that supports the file format may be missing, or the file may be open in another application.

That's not likely.

Very unlikely if it actually only half saved. It's a good plan to expect regular corruptions, for all sorts of reasons, and plan your backups accordingly on both a small scale (hourly or more frequently), medium scale (days to weeks) and long scale (years).

What versions of ID are you and your client using? I would suggest you get a screen shot from your customer for confirmation.

Thank you all for helping....

I did receive both types of files, I tried changing the extensions on each one because of something I read elswhere. The indd file is 17mb and the idml file is 124bytes. The folder of links is 4gb!

I never open files on a thumb drive, I just don't trust that. IMO they are only good for transfering stuff. We also received a different second drive when we told them we couldn't open the first files, but with the same result.

The filename is just 3 words (one of them is, of course, "FINAL"), with an underscore and a hyphen.

Jane-e / thank you for looking. I just emailed the link to the docs. Are you related to WALL-E?

They packaged and zipped the file

Try moving the zip archive to your internal drive and unzip the archive there. Also what is the exact file name? Check for illegal characters.

Larzaroni  wrote They packaged and zipped the files, put that on a thumb drive, and drove it over here. I have updated to the latest available version of InDesign, tried to open the doc from the menu with File / Open - as a copy, tried changing filename extensions between .idml and .indd for both versions of the supplied doc,

Hi Larzaroni​

Another thing that occurs to me is that I have heard of thumb drives corrupting files. (Google it.) Does it still open on the original computer?

If so, try a new thumb drive or put it on the Creative Cloud (or drop box) and send a link to the other person to download.

Also, changing the filename to .idml does not make it an .idml. When the file is packaged, .idml is checked by default and you should have both versions.

Jane

Larzaroni  wrote Who wants to look at my flies?

Hi Larzaroni,

You can sent the file to Adobe at this email address:

corrupt_indesign_docs@adobe.com

If the file is larger than 10 Mb, you can zip (and password protect) the file and upload to Creative Cloud account (or Dropbox) and email the document link.

Jane

Could you have your client resave the file as an IDML file (File>Export>InDesign Markup (IDML)) and see if that will open through your version of InDesign?