Unable to Open or Copy Corrupted Excel Files on Network Drive

Question

Hello,

I have encountered an issue with few Excel files stored on a network path. Out of six files, three appear to be corrupted. When I try to open these files by double-clicking, Excel launches but displays the following error message: "Could not open '...xlsx'." Additionally, when I attempt to copy these corrupted files to another folder or even to another PC, I receive the error: "Invalid MS-DOS function." I am not able to copy these corrupted excel files out of the folder. I also tried to copy the folder, at that time only 3 files were copied other 3 files are giving the same error as "Invalid MS-DOS function".

Message when tried to open.

Message when tried to copy.

I have also tried using the "Open and Repair" function in Excel 2010 and 2019 and tried to open in safe mode, but the files still won't open. Interestingly, even corrupted files should still be copy able. To test this, I purposely corrupted an Excel file by changing its format type and received a specific error related to the format type, but I was still able to copy the file.

I also attempted to use the xcopy command to copy the corrupted files. However, the output of the command was:

"The target volume does not support symbolic links. 0 File(s) copied."

Additionally, when I try to open the Excel file using other means, such as Notepad or Notepad++, the file will not open.

We have examined the event logs, but there are no application or disk errors. The disk's state is reported as healthy.

I also tried Recuva and file recovery tools to recover the data, but these two applications are not allowing me to enter the network path, only available for local disks.

Details:

Files are stored on a network drive.

Error when opening in Excel: "Could not open '\network_path\folder\abc.xlsx'."

Error when copying: "Invalid MS-DOS function."

xcopy output: "The target volume does not support symbolic links. 0 File(s) copied."

Tried using "Open and Repair" in Excel, checked for drive health, and attempted to open the files in different Excel versions.

I can copy and open other files from the same network path without any issues.

Tried to open with libreOffice. Couldn't able to open, gave options like open Read-only. When clicked on Read-only gave error "Read Error. Data could not be read from the file"

Based on my testing, even corrupted files should be copyable, so this behavior seems unusual.

Could anyone suggest possible reasons for this issue and potential solutions to recover or copy these files?

Thank you in advance for your help!

Answer 1

Out of six files, three appear to be corrupted. I purposely corrupted an Excel file by changing its format type and received a specific error related to the format type, but I was still able to copy the file.

As you saw, if you have corruption in the file data, then you should still be able to copy the file. (If someone renamed a .txt file as a .xlsx file for example.)

An internet search suggests that the "invalid ms dos function" error is caused by file system corruption. I don't think that there is anything that you can do with that over the network.

Have a system administrator RDP to the server and run chkdsk to validate the NTFS file system on the local drive. Have them run notepad and see if it can read the file locally. It won't be formatted properly, but it would at least verify that the file data can be read.

You could ask them to run the file recovery tools that you mentioned against the local disk, but there's no guarantee that they will recover the entire file. You might be better off asking your sysadmin to restore those 3 files from the last backup.