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Has anyone come across this error when opening up a MXD file?

Opening the selected ArcMap document failed.

enter image description here

ArcMap had frozen on me right before this, even though no processes were in the middle of running - clicking anywhere triggered no response other than that super annoying "ding!". I was able to close the program by right clicking in the task bar and selecting close, at which point I was asked to save the results of the editing session I was in and also save the MXD file. I did both. And now it can't be opened up.

Any ideas on how to fix this?

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You really are fairly stuck here. You may be able to recover your map document using the MXD Doctor tool:

MXD Doctor is a stand-alone application provided with ArcGIS: (Start>All Programs>ArcGIS>Desktop Tools>MXD Doctor) It provides functionality to analyze broken .mxd files. Depending on the analysis, entities contained in the broken .mxd file can be copied from the broken file into a new or existing .mxd file.

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  • This fixed whatever the problem was! I actually didn't know that there was such a thing! – traggatmot Oct 9 '15 at 2:15
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You could try opening the mxd from WITHIN ArcMap vs using the mxd itself to launch ArcMap.

I've seen that before where an mxd won't open from double-clicking, but instead needs to be opened from within the program

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This issue happened to me this morning, and I solved it by going to Windows Explorer, right clicking on the MXD file, COPY, paste. Now you have the original and a new copy, and the copy opened just fine.

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