Any ways to recover corrupted VI file? Need help for an elementary school Lego NXT club start-up.

[Tomy.]

Hello, first time poster here... Need help with options from NI to recover a corrup VI file.

My son's elementary school starts up a Lego robotics club and possibly get into FLL next year. I am a veteran software engineer with a passion for Lego and experience with RobotC, NXTG, LabView, NBC, NXC etc. programming on Mindstorm and they asked me to participate in the initial ramp-up of the kids. I have been working on a few interesting demos and useful tools for the kids for a few months now. The principal has not yet made the decision about the budget and the toolset to be used and I wanted to utilize this time to provide him with a set of tools and helpers that would let him understand the strenghts of LabView over other available setups. So I developed a bunch of helpers (for example high level signal input, output, PID controller, tachometer etc. blocks) with my Labview 7.1. I also worked for over 4 weeks (part time) on a fully blown NXT terminal module oscilloscope with 1 ms resolution, complex trigger setup and other options to be used by the kids in the lab to view real-time NXT functions on the screen, should the principal decide to go with LabView. Unfortunately I had a hard drive crash while travelling on a business trip for weeks in February with my laptop and the LLB file of the oscilloscope project got corrupted with weeks of works into it. I was able to recover all but 1 file, which is the main scope file. Besides the corrupted VI, I also have a distribution version with the diagrams removed, but I would not be able to make any further improvements and changes any more so it'd be best to recover whatever could be from the corrupted VI file.

My question after the long introduction (thanks for those who read all the way to here by the way) is, what options do I have to recover the corrupt VI? The size of the corrupt VI file is over 1M, and a 512 byte sector was corrupted. Any help would be greatly appreciated!!!

[T-REX$]

Hi Tomy!

NI strongly suggests only using LLBs for compact storage and file transport. Any development efforts should use directories of VIs to mitigate corruption issues. It is recommended that you keep everything within a LabVIEW project, and also keep backup copies during development. That said, if you contact NI customer support (via email or telephone from ni.com/support) an Applications Engineer might be able to help you uncorrupt your labview .llb. Keep us posted here on how that goes! 

[Tomy.]

Thank you for your response. Since I don't have a service program membership with NI for several $100's, the support site does not give me the ability to file a service request with NI. This is whay I posted here the first place. Can I still use phone support?

And thanks for the note about using LLBs during development, I think I got lucky that out of the entire LLB only 1 VI got corrupted I was able to use llb decorruptor to save the rest of the LLB. Will keep in mind going forward (and do external backups during trips as well).

[T-REX$]

Hi Tomy,

I thought you might have access to support through work, sorry. If you have a .edu email address, you can also get email and phone support. After doing a little research, it looks like if you have already tried the .llb decorrupter (not quite sure where you got it) then there isn't much that can be done. Here is another thread that I found on the subject, and it seems unresolved. I'll post back here if I learn anything new. Sorry I can't be more help!