Shapefile will not appear when added to ArcGIS file

Question

I have been trying to add some data to one of my ArcGIS file. I can see that the shapefile is added in my side pane, I can open the attribute table and see the values and line items are present. However, I cannot see the shapefile itself when I look at my map. Does anyone know what I'm doing wrong? This is for a pretty large project I'm working on and I really need some guidance as we are all new to this program still and no one in my seems to know what is causing it.

clt_cabq · Answer

I'm a little concerned that the what may be the .shp and .dbf file are only 1kb, this usually should be rather larger.

MervynLotter · Answer

Can you confirm that the shapefile includes identical files with the following extensions?  .shp, .shx, and.dbf?

If so, then it should show up if not corrupted.  But is there a chance thar your .prj is the wrong projection?  Happens when using define projection tool to change projection.  For example, perhaps the shapefile is a a geographic coordinate system however the projection file says it is in Web Mercator? That kind of mismatch in projections will result in it not displaying.

Lastly, if all of these don't work then perhaps also delete the .sbn and .sbx files (that store the spatial index) as I have had trouble with them before being corrupted. But in these cases, if you zoom out far enough the points do show.  But do first back them up.

From your screengrab I cannot tell what the shapefile extensions were as you are hiding the file name extensions.  You should change these in Windows Explorer from the View tab.

elcraig2 · Answer

So I tried all of these options and none of them worked out for me. Do you guys see anything wrong with the file type's I'm using? Is there anything missing or incorrectly formatted that would prevent me from seeing the shapefile correctly? (Btw this is an old screenshot, I have already extracted the files from this zip folder so I do not believe that is the issue)