HELP NEEDED: Project not opening

Scrivener Scrivener for Windows
1

Hi all,

I’m having issues with opening a Scrivener project of mine, and I’m hoping that there’s an easy solution.

To give you a bit of background, I had some issues this afternoon where my laptop’s power supply kept cutting out. The same Scrivener project was open both times, and I fear that the improper shutdown may have corrupted the Scrivener file. Now, whenever I try to open the project, it won’t open.

If I double-click the ‘Project’ file in the Scrivener Project folder, it presents me with the ‘New Project’ screen that’s presented to first-time Scrivener users (I’m sure you’re all familiar with the screen I’m talking about, but I’ve attached a screenshot anyway).

If I attempt to open the project via the File > Recent Projects method, nothing happens. Literally nothing. I don’t even get an error message. If I try to open the project via the ‘Open Recent’ or ‘Opening Existing Project’ button on the attached screenshot, nothing happens.

I’m still able to access all of the Rich Text Files from my Scrivener project, as these are saved in the Files > Docs folder right up to the very minute that the second improper shutdown occurred, so I effectively haven’t lost my work.

However, as it’s a long and complex project with dozens of folders and approximately 350 individual text files, I don’t want to have to go through and have to copy/paste all of my existing Rich Text Files into a new Project.

The preferred outcome is to repair the Project that I currently have, so if any of you are able to offer advice, it would be greatly appreciated!

If you need more information to be able to help, please don’t hesitate to contact me via private message.

Regards,
Matt.

Untitled.png
Untitled.png647×536 17.4 KB

2

Additional information that you might need:

  • I’m running Windows 8
  • This issue isn’t occurring when I attempt to open any of my other Scrivener projects, so I don’t believe it’s an issue with Scrivener itself.
3

Are there multiple .scrivx files (with the yellow Scrivener icon) in the .scriv folder? Usually named “project”. That would cause what you’re describing; the solution is to remove the extra ones–you can just drag them out to your desktop rather than deleting them to check this. Other duplicate files in the project could be a problem too; usually that’s something that comes from a sync glitch, when a project is stored live in Dropbox or similar, but possibly a similar problem came about from the crashes. You could do a little poking inside the folder and remove “copy” items. For safety, make a backup of the entire project .scriv folder first by right-clicking it and choosing “Send to \ Compressed (zipped) folder”.