In addition to what John Russell suggests (which works great), ensure you remove any partitions and the source HDFS files from any partitions/tables created incorrectly as parquet.   In my case, I was inserting the data into a table stored as text, then transfering to a parquet type storage table successfully.  However, my query was still throwing an "invalid file footer" error because I had invalid partitions that hadn't been completely dropped/deleted from HDFS,  specfifically: /user/hive/warehouse/<databasename>/<table_name>/<partition>   ... View more