I've recently been working on a mod for Morrowind that does little more than add a small town and a couple NPCs. It had been going rather well. I saved the file, closed the construction set, and then turned off my computer. When I turned it back on the next day, I tried loading the .esp only to be met with an error "Example.esp is not a vaild tes file!!"

I looked into it a bit more with Wrye Mash, which informed me that I my mod is "Missing Headers". I'm not sure what this means or the remedy to fix it.

Does anyone have any experience with this? If so, how can I fix it? What can I do to prevent it in the future?

I've yet to continue working on my other projects for fear that the same thing could happen to them.

IIRC the CS by default makes a copy of last edited mod called pukcab.bak, you may try renaming and opening it

Failing this,

install tes3cmd. exe (latest vv0.37v) in Data Files folder, try

tes3cmd. exe recover Example.esp

(note I put a space before exe else silly Cloudflare blocks posting)

First off, thanks for taking the time to respond to me. I greatly admire your work abot, and I'm kind of awestruck that you responded.

but wow, Cloudflare is ridiculous. I've tried posting some logs of tes3cmd and the batches I've been using for it several times now. I even tried screengrabbing a picture of my original post and just linking to that before getting hit with a message telling me I don't have permission to post links. So I guess I'll have to resort to ambiguous brevity.

I had neglected to mention that I had indeed tried using pukcab, but the same error of "Backup.esp is not a valid TES file" occured.

Simply put, tes3cmd told me there were errors at lines 6129 and 2775, with the latter showing up with a blank record type. As far as restoration goes, nothing was able to get restored.

After following your instructions on what to put in tes3cmd (as well as using some scripts for general cleaning) I opened the construction set and once again, the same "This is not a valid TES file!" occured.

I'm not sure where to go from here.

I think you renamed your esp with the wrong name, instead rename Example.pukcab to Example.esp and not rename it to what you just did Backup.esp, which is not a valid TES3 file if I understood abot correctly.

Also, as for posting links here, all new members need 10 posts I think before you're allowed to post links.

http://www.gamesas.com/topic/724862-forum-rules-and-general-information/

Rename it to the original file name?

The original file name was Himmelryn.esp. I used example.esp as an example, although I probably shouldn't have in hindsight.

I took your advice though and tried renaming it to the original filename, but the TES construction set spat out the same error "Himmelryn.esp is not a valid TES file"

EDIT:

For some more details, I loaded Himmelryn in the construction set and found this in warnings.txt: