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[Solved] OO3.2 crashed, 4.1.3 upgrade, can't recover files

Posted: Wed Oct 25, 2017 5:30 am
by insaner
I made my best effort to google the forums (and elsewhere) to figure out how to solve this, but no luck.

I was having trouble with OO 3.2 hanging for 30mins at a time after I pasted html from a web page to create a new document to print in a nice formatted way. It had images which were links to images on the internet. That's my guess as to the origin of the hanging.

In any case, I got fed up with this behavior, wanting to get some work done, and so I upgraded to OO 4.1.3 via the rpms which I downloaded from the Apache OO site.

The mistake I guess was installing the rpms with rpm -Uvh, as opposed to rpm -i, but oh well, too late now.

So I launch OO 4.1.3 expecting the same file recovery dialog to pop up, and it's not there. And now I cannot figure out how to bring it back, or which file it is that contains the list of files to recover from the 3.2 user profile, or what to do at all. Thanks for any help in advance.

Re: OO 3.2 crashed, I upgraded to 4.1.3 now can't recover fi

Posted: Wed Oct 25, 2017 1:18 pm
by RoryOF
i think you are out of luck; it is probable that installing the OO4.1.3 used the disk space in which the deleted file(s) were stored. I suggest you download PhotoRec and see if it will recover earlier versions of your files.

Re: OO 3.2 crashed, I upgraded to 4.1.3 now can't recover fi

Posted: Wed Oct 25, 2017 7:53 pm
by insaner
What would be the recovery file though? Ie, the file that contains the list of files that OO.o tries to open on launch? Maybe I can find an old backup somewhere.

My next option will be to re-install the old OO 3.2 and see if the file is still there by some chance.

Re: OO 3.2 crashed, I upgraded to 4.1.3 now can't recover fi

Posted: Wed Oct 25, 2017 7:57 pm
by RoryOF
It may be in registrymodifications.xcu

Re: OO 3.2 crashed, I upgraded to 4.1.3 now can't recover fi

Posted: Wed Oct 25, 2017 8:43 pm
by John_Ha
Sort all files by date and look for files at the time it happened. Be sure to make hidden files visible.

According to How manually recover from Auto Recovery backup? the AutoRecovery file for fred.odt is called fred_0.odt and is stored in the backup folder (which is C:\Users\xxxxxx\AppData\Roaming\OpenOffice\4\user\backup by default).

That being said, when I deliberately crashed Writer I could not find anything in the backup folder. However, the temporary files were still there and could be recovered - see [Tutorial] How to find and un-delete Writer temporary files for a discussion and for more suggestions.

Re: OO 3.2 crashed, I upgraded to 4.1.3 now can't recover fi

Posted: Thu Oct 26, 2017 6:41 pm
by insaner
It may be in registrymodifications.xcu
YES!!!! That was it!!

I closed OO.o 4, and in a terminal did:

Code: Select all

cp ~/.openoffice.org/3/user/registrymodifications.xcu ~/.openoffice.org/3/user/registrymodifications.xcu-BACKUPCOPY
mv ~/.openoffice/4/user/registrymodifications.xcu ~/.openoffice/4/user/registrymodifications.xcu-BACKUPCOPY-FRESH-oo4
cp ~/.openoffice.org/3/user/registrymodifications.xcu ~/.openoffice/4/user/
Re-launched OO.o 4, and BOOM! All my files are being recovered! I need to next make sure that the actual registry modifications in the old file don't cause conflicts with what should be the ones for OO.o 4, but for now, I am golden! Thanks so much!! SOLVED!

Re: OO 3.2 crashed, I upgraded to 4.1.3 now can't recover fi

Posted: Thu Oct 26, 2017 6:44 pm
by insaner
Ok, how do I mark as solved? Do I just manually edit the subject line?

Re: OO 3.2 crashed, I upgraded to 4.1.3 now can't recover fi

Posted: Thu Oct 26, 2017 6:47 pm
by RoryOF
On your first post in the thread, manually edit the Subject line to insert [Solved] at the beginning. You may have to edit the Subject line to make room. Also tick the green tick box.
 Edit: I've done it for you. 

Re: [Solved] OO3.2 crashed, 4.1.3 upgrade, can't recover fil

Posted: Thu Oct 26, 2017 6:58 pm
by insaner
Thanks! And thanks again for the help!