The following all assumes your shapefile might still be readable just not by the tool you selected.
Some things you have probably already tried 🙂
-- Can you just open it in Pro by adding it to a map?
-- Can you use a Feature to Feature copy to create another feature class and then feed that to the Pandas?
-- Can you try bypassing "arcgis" and use "shapefile" module instead?
import pandas as pd
import shapefile
sf = shapefile.Reader("Oregon.shp", encoding = 'utf-8')
fields = [x[0] for x in sf.fields][1:]
print(fields)
records = sf.records()
df = pd.DataFrame(records, columns = fields)
# but this is not spatial data, just attributes...
# probably not what you want but fast and easy!!
You should be able to manipulate it with geopandas too, but first you have to install it. Conda was taking so long to "solve the environment" with the default environment that I just made a new one temporarily with "conda create --name=geopandas -c conda-forge geopandas"
Then you could try this, first "conda activate geopandas"
import geopandas as gp
df = gp.read_file('Oregon.shp')
df.to_file('Oregon_copy.shp')
Just three lines to read and write a feature class... Of course you can do the usual Pandas dataframe manipulations on "df". Geopandas is not arcpy, so it won't be the same but it's nice to have alternatives when one thing does not work. Geopandas depends on "Fiona" to convert file formats so in theory you should be able to write output to a FGDB.