this project appears to be damaged it cannot be opened

[Stefan36136496ox7q]

Can anyone explain to me why, after 2 evenings of work, 5 backups of my project and 40 or so Autosaves of a project in Premiere pro 23, Suddenly I get the message 'this project appears to be damaged it cannot be opened' in every single backup or autosave file. 

It appears to me it can't be true that suddenly all the projectfiles are corrupt. What can I do? There must be a fix I would think! 

What happened is that prior to the problems I had a PC that crashed and I had to restart it. That's when the trouble started. My videofiles and premiere pro files are on an external drive. PLEASE HELP ME OUT!

[John T Smith]

You need to ask program questions in the forum for the program you are using
To ask in the forum for your program please start at https://community.adobe.com/
Moving from Using the Community (which is about the forums) to the correct forum

[MyerPj]

PC or Mac? PP is designed to use local drives. You may be OK with that, but an external drive can locate itself in the OS in different spots. Perhaps something got damaged in PP itself, can you open any other projects? 

[Stefan36136496ox7q]

I can open other projects so that's not the problem. This is what I tried allready and it looks hopeless:

• Opening Auto Saves -> Every single one gives the same error message as the project (also tried renaming them and opening them)
• Created a new project, tried importing the whole project -> Same error message
• Started the project holding Alt and reset preferences, cache data etc. -> Not Working
• Closed Premiere, logged out of Creative Cloud, restarted my pc, opened premiere, signed in -> Not working
• deinstalling and reinstalling premiere -> Not working

[MTW MEDIA]

Create a new project then try to import the old project into a new project. Use the import entire project option. it may help.

[Stefan36136496ox7q]

Unfortunately it didn't. See above. 

[MyerPj]

Wow! You've been all over that. Good job in testing now. If you want to put up a link on google drive, etc.. just for the project, I'll try it here, but as you've said, it doesn't sound promissing.

[Stefan36136496ox7q]

Hello, Attached is the Premiere project. Can you see or do anything with this or do you need the whole project to try and make something out of this problem?

[MyerPj]

No, sorry. The project appears to be corrupted in a more basic way, like on an OS level, rather the PP. On a PP .prproj, if you have 7zip installed, you can right-click a project and select "Open Archive". The PP project is a compressed file, with one file inside, of the same name as the main .prproj. Then you can right-click and "Edit" the inner file, and it opens in a text editor and all the code of the project is there in an XML file.

With your project, even 7zip will not work with the Edit command. You get a 7zip error as below:

It looks like that project is really gone. I'm wondering how all the AutoSave files have been corrupted too...

Anyway, well we gave it a shot. I've not seen this on a .prproj before.