Help recovering document

[silverdun]

I'm new so hope I'm posting in the right area. I appreciate any help.

I keep my diary on open office and today I was writing it up when we had a power cut. My laptop needs a new battery & so everything closed. When it started again, I was able to open my old diary page from last month but not the one I'm working on now. It salvaged one but not the other.

It had a tick on last months document & it opened fine but a red cross for February. When I tried to manually open it from my documents page, it gives this message first:

If click ok I get this:

I know I didn't lock it, so this makes me nervous I don't even know how to lock it. (I was alone in the house & didn't leave my laptop from writing the morning in it so I know nobody else locked it)

If I click either option to read, I get a pattern instead of words:

Is there anything I can do to salvage my writing, please?

It prob sounds silly, but it means a lot to me as it's my "recovery diary", I suffer from depression & it's a tool I've discovered works. Winter is my worst time so I've been practising different things and I really need it to progress. It was a whole complete month I realise, I'd forgotten it was March today

Any help greatly appreciated, thank you.

I use Open Office 3 and I use Windows Vista on an elderly Toshiba laptop

[thomasjk]

With all ############# in it your document is hopelessly corrupted. The locking issue is related to your crash as is the corruption. There is most likely a file in the form of .~lock.filename on your hard drive as a result of the crash. This file is generated each time a file is opened for editing and goes away when you close a file normally. Search for .~lock and delete the file found. I hope you have a backup copy which may be in your user profile http://forum.openoffice.org/en/forum/vi ... 74&t=12426 as filenam.bak.

[Hagar Delest]

Sadly, quite nothing to do, see: 22 pages term paper replaced with pound signs.
Any power shortage for example? It's a common root cause of such problem.

Check the temporary folder of the system (see in OOo Tools>Options>OOo>Paths). If there are folders like sgmlf.tmp with a file having the same name inside, make a copy of that file, rename it in .odt and cross your fingers. Else, I hope you had a backup (or a copy in a mailbox)...

It seems there are less troubles with latest version 3.4.1. What is your version exactly? Your forum signature shows only 3.