Autocad Drawing File Type
Issue:
Have the person who created them save them in 2004 file format and resend them to you. Download DWG Trueview (from the AutoDesk website.it's free) and convert the drawings to a file format you can open. Ask a friend who has a newer version of AutoCAD to open each drawing as do a 'saveas' to an earlier file format. AutoCAD terminated while saving a drawing file, such as during a power surge or outage. Old drawings have been used repeatedly over a long time period. Network anomalies have occurred (such as transmission errors, file locking, and latent writing of data).
When opening a drawing file in AutoCAD, the following error message appears:
Causes:
The error message usually indicates that the drawing has been damaged beyond use, but there could be other environmental factors causing it to fail or to become corrupted. Known causes are, among others, hardware malfunction, transmittal issues, and ransomware encryption.Solution:
It may still be possible to recover the file (see Recovering drawing files which fail to open in AutoCAD).
Additional suggestions
- If the drawing was last saved in a newer version of AutoCAD, resave it from that version to an older file format, one that is compatible or older than the version of AutoCAD being used.
- Try opening the drawing file directly instead of using the Recent Documents menu.
- If the file was created in a non-AutoCAD product, try opening the file in the native product and exporting to AutoCAD DWG format, if available.
- Check that the storage location that holds the drawing is working properly.
- Move the drawing to a different location such as the local hard disk, to rule out network or cloud storage issues.
- If the drawing was emailed, have the sender ZIP the file and resend it.
- Attempt to clean and repair the file (see How to repair corrupt AutoCAD files).
- If copying from a zipped folder, try extracting the drawings before copying them to a new location.
Note: