Illustrator can't open file

[Andy_Marsh@adobeforums.com]

I've had this happen a few times now since installing Illustrator 10 on OS X 10.2.8...

Students have saved their Illustrator document as normal. Gone to re-open it a day or two later and Illustrator reports an error that "the file "whateveritis.ai" is in an unknown format and cannot be opened"

I've tried copying the file to a different machine/drive, making a new file and placing, opening in other programs such as photoshop/freehand/etc and have even tried changing the file suffix to pdf and opening/placing.

Nothing I've tried works.

Can anyone shed any light on what might be causing the file to become damaged or how I might get it back into Illustrator?

Any help appreciated.

[Rich_Carroll@adobeforums.com]

Turn off PDF compatibility in the save as dialog box. Also, we've found that OSX has issues in saving directly to a server. Try saving locally (with PDF compatibility turned off,) and then copying the file to the server.
Once your file gets to this point, it typically is hosed. You can try to place the file into another Illustrator document, but this only partially works.

[Andy_Marsh@adobeforums.com]

Thanks for that Rich :-)

Will sort the pdf compatibility thing next week. Although will be a bit of a pain having to trash the students prefs. Will have to look into the saving issue as well and maybe create a shared folder on each machine since the students currently only have access privs to their user area on the server.