Fix Corrupt STEP File SolidWorks Won't Import — Recovery Workflow with OnShape and FreeCAD
“Failed to create empty document.” That error message from SolidWorks when opening a STEP file means the STEP importer could not even initialize a document container before hitting a fatal problem. It is not a timeout. It is not a permissions issue. The file has structural corruption that SolidWorks’s geometric kernel cannot work around. STEP Import Error Messages and What They Actually Mean SOLIDWORKS and Inventor produce several different error strings for STEP import failures. Which one you see tells you where to start the recovery. ...