Indesign 4 - Error code 5...please help!!

Question

Hello all,
I recently started work at a new company where I have been tasked to design their new catalogue. I got approx. 100 pages in and then yesterday morning, my indesign file suddenly refused to open stating it had 'Error code 5' and was unrecoverable.
Needless to say I have tried copying my file, renaming it, opening it with Reader Pro, changing my Indesign preferences and any other tid bit that sounded like it might work that I could find on the web, all to no avail.
I have read that this often occurs in files where images were not linked properly, but mine were. I assumed my employer backed-up his files, but it turns out that he felt this was unnnecessary and unless someone has a bright idea out there I will have to go back to a copy I happened to make but that was 10 days (and half the content) ago. Needless to say my deadline looms.....
The only ray of hope I have is apparently this problem can sometimes be fixed by converting the file to Quarkexpress and back again, but I lack the resources to do this.
If you think you can somehow fix the code or anything else that might help, I would very much appreciate it. My broken file can be downloaded from this link https://rcpt.yousendit.com/932300049/28e29def444af6141251dda6c3284dae.
Thanks for your help.

Answer 1

Hello Pete and thank you for trying.
I'm not at work presently, so I can't give you the version information (I will let you know on Monday morning).
I would love to know how/ why my file become corrupted. I'm experienced enough to know to lean on apple+s every couple of minutes, but I had always assumed that a closed file was pretty much safe (unless of course the hard drive that it's stored on fries).
Thursday night I saved my file and closed it - I left Indesign running whith my employers previous catalogue (also a .indd file- but much bigger and with lots of link and font errors) open. I left my Mac running but Friday morning when I got to work the screen was displaying gray and white vertical stripes, and as I thought my file was safe (it was stored on an external Lacie hard drive and closed), I did a hard reboot.
The mac came back on, my screens functioned perfectly, I opened the old catalogue (no problem) and then tried to open my file and got the error code. The hard drive was a shared drive, hard wired to my Mac on through to the rest of the network (which only comprises a few Macs).
The anwser to how it was being backed up is 'not enough'. About a week ago, I made a back up file-just incase (which is the one I still have), but honestly believed the company to be backing up the hard drive as we store our whole image gallery on it - but apperently not :s
Ironicly, had my file not crashed, the first thing on my agenda that morning was to make another back up.
Do you think it was the hard reboot affecting the hard drive,or do you think it was the session of indesign that I had been using to create the file was still open when I rebooted?
Thank you again!