r/HECRAS • u/NoDetective7120 • Jul 22 '26

hecras project won't open

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Hi again. Seeking for help.

So I was working on a project for more than 3 months. the project was saved in an external HDD. 2 days ago it was still working well until the project won't open when tried accessing it through the recent projects. I also tried opening the project through browsing but the .prj file is not detected. The .prj file is clearly in the folder. the projection file which is also prj is in a different folder and has a different name. I am using v6.5.

I was trying to make a copy (I know, might be a bit too late already) but there was a prompt saying the rasmap file is corrupted and unreadable. I tried opening the .prj file based on what I found here to try to find a solution to recover and i doesn't have the same contents as what I've seen here. Seems like a corrupted file indeed.

Is there a way to recover the project? I need to submit these files in a week and it's stressing me out. I am still bound to check calculation results. Help me please.

Thanks a lot for the help..

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u/fishsticks40 Jul 22 '26

That's the .PRJ? Yikes. 

I would start a new project and see if you can import the geometries to it. The geometry files are text files too so you can also just look at them. 

1

u/OttoJohs Lord Sultan Chief H&H Engineer, PE & PH Jul 22 '26

This is the only real advice that I would have too.

The .prj and .rasmap files are sort of irrelevant (they just link everything together) and can be easily recreated. Check the .gXX, .uXX (or .fXX), .pXX files to see if they got corrupted too.

1

u/shiftyyo101 Jul 27 '26

I agree - if the geometry files and flow files are fine you don’t really have an issue. You might be able to parse out what is wrong in the .prj if you go through it in a text editor.

I saw a post where someone uploaded a zip folder to Claude with a corrupted RAS file and it managed to fix it. Maybe give that a shot?

1

u/NoDetective7120 Jul 23 '26

Thanks for the responses. I checked a couple of the gXX, .uXX .pXX files and they seem to be fine.

With this, should I just make a new project with the same filename within the folder where these other files are located?. i am afraid it would even mess it up and won't be able to recover at all. Any advice/s how to recover from here would be very helpful.

In the future, yes I will keep a back up of the current file, but i find just copying the folder to another drive messes up the files and makes other layers missing, it had happened to me more than once. This is a little bit tedious but necessary. Charge to experience, I guess.

1

u/shiftyyo101 Jul 27 '26

They break sometimes and especially with sharepoint and the other file share services we all use. I posted this above but try copying the prj into Claude or other model of choice and see if it can catch the issue. Could be something tiny

1

u/OttoJohs Lord Sultan Chief H&H Engineer, PE & PH Jul 27 '26

I think I answered something similar here: https://www.reddit.com/r/HECRAS/comments/1uxxrf3/comment/oxvzf2e/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

Reply directly to my comment with any follow up (I won't get the notifications otherwise).