"PDF header not found" — what it means and how to repair it.
"PDF header not found" means the reader could not locate the marker that identifies the bytes as a PDF. Upload the file for a repair attempt and see a free recovery summary if FileFix can rebuild and validate the document.
Free preview — pay only if you download ($12)
Your files auto-delete within 48 hours
No person looks at your file as part of repair
Uploading your file.
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Recovering what we can.
Analyzing your file...
Here's what we recovered.
Review the watermarked preview before checkout. Previews are capped at 90 seconds.
Repair your file
Choose a supported file to see what can be repaired before checkout.
Simulated checkout — no payment is processed.
Optional — we'll email your private download link.
Download repaired fileYou preview before you pay. If the download is materially worse than the preview you approved, we'll refund you.
Good news — your file isn't damaged. No charge.
There's nothing to repair. If it still looks broken, the issue may be the player, codec, or viewer on your device rather than the file itself.
We couldn't recover this one.
The file is too damaged to rebuild, so there is nothing to preview and no charge. You can try another file.
Have another clip from the same device?
A healthy video recorded on the same device — ideally the same settings — gives the repair engine a template to rebuild from. It can unlock repairs that fail on their own.
FileFix can't fix that kind of file yet.
Right now we repair video, audio, and document files (MP4, MOV, M4V, MKV, AVI, TS, MTS, M2TS, MPG, MPEG, VOB, 3GP, WebM, M4A, WAV, MP3, AAC, FLAC, OGG, AIFF, XLSX, DOCX, ZIP, and PDF). We're adding support for more formats over time.
Something went wrong.
The request could not be completed.
Why this happens
A PDF normally begins with a header that identifies the format and version. This error appears when that marker was removed by truncation, shifted behind stray leading bytes, or never existed because a different kind of response was saved with a .pdf extension.
The missing header is separate from the page objects and cross-reference data later in the file. If those objects remain readable, a rewrite path can construct a new PDF wrapper and cross-reference structure around them; if the upload is actually HTML, an image, or an empty file, there is no PDF document to rebuild.
FileFix tests recovery candidates and reopens them with recovery disabled. A candidate must contain at least one readable page before the free summary reports its page and object counts.
What we can and can't recover
We can usually fix
- PDFs that show "the file is damaged and could not be repaired"
- PDFs Chrome or Edge won't open ("Failed to load PDF document")
- Files cut off mid-download or mid-save
- PDFs with a broken cross-reference table or trailer
We can't fix
- Password-protected or encrypted PDFs
- Genuinely empty (0-byte) files
- Deleted or formatted files (that's data recovery, a different job)
- Pages whose content was never written to disk
How it works
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Upload Drop the file in. It uploads over an encrypted connection. The repair runs automatically — no person looks at your file.
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Free Watermarked Preview You see exactly what we recovered — page and object counts and a short excerpt of recovered text.
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Pay & Download If the summary shows what you need, unlock the repaired PDF for a one-time $12.
You see a recovery summary built from your actual file before you decide anything — so you never guess.
See what's recoverable.
Free recovery summary · files auto-delete within 48 hours
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Questions
The engine tries several PDF recovery and rewrite paths, including reconstructing damaged cross-reference information. Each candidate is reopened without recovery mode and counted for readable pages and objects before the best validated result is selected.
It shows the number of pages and PDF objects in the validated repaired file, plus a short text excerpt when readable text operators can be extracted. The excerpt may be empty for image-only or specially encoded pages.
It can. Rewriting a damaged PDF preserves readable objects, but missing fonts, images, content streams, annotations, forms, bookmarks, or relationships cannot be recreated. Use the summary as evidence that a PDF was rebuilt, then inspect the downloaded document before relying on its layout.
No. This is corruption repair, not password removal. Encrypted or password-protected PDFs are outside the repair flow.
A page can be structurally readable while its content is an image, uses font encodings the summary does not decode, or has no simple text-drawing operators. Page recovery and text extraction are different checks.
The engine validates the candidates it can produce and selects by recovered page count, then object count. The free summary reports counts from that selected file.
A one-time $12 — and only if the repair works. The recovery summary is free, and checkout is unavailable when no repair path produces a validated PDF with at least one page.
No. Repair, validation, and summary generation are automated. Files auto-delete within 48 hours.
No. FileFix performs the repair on its servers. You only need a PDF reader to inspect the downloaded result.
No. The engine can reorganize and rewrite PDF objects that remain in the uploaded bytes. It cannot recreate a page or content stream that never arrived.
Not necessarily. The summary extracts a limited set of PDF text-drawing operations; it does not run OCR. Scanned pages can contribute to the page count while producing no excerpt.
Do not rely on it. PDF repair rewrites the file, while a digital signature authenticates specific original bytes. Verify signatures independently and obtain a fresh signed copy when authenticity matters.
No. It writes a separate repaired PDF from a validated candidate. The original file on your device remains unchanged.