Does anyone know why random mxds and shps go corrupt over time when they haven't been accessed in a period of years? For instance, you work on a project, create maps and data that are working fine, the project goes dormant for 2 years so the data sits on an external drive. Then when you try to bring it back up random files simply won't open. Is there any hope to recover those files?? Especially the attached one?
assuming the zip contains all the necessary parts of the shapefile, the shapefile repair in this link is one of the last ditch efforts
Shapefile Repair Tool no longer in scripts to download?
it will try to match the number of records in the *.dbf with the number of records in the *.shp. If it works, it is usually a last line of defence and comes from a time prior recent Arc* software incarnations.