Apache OpenOffice Community Forum

Hi everybody!

I saved my master thesis in a USB Hard Drive.
Today i went to a copyshop and the guy working there deleted all the files in there, including my thesis. All i have in it now, is the PDF file he saved.
Using a data recovery tool i was able to get back my file with the thesis but i can't open it: it says "the file is not in the WinWord6 format".
How can i open my file? Is there the possibility to open it again or at least to have it back partially?

Thanks to everyone who will help me out!

Ilaria

Welcome to the forums.
Does the recovered file and with the .odt extension? If it does, then there is a chance of at least partially recovering it.
There is [Hint]How to fix my ODT file but be warned, it is very long. 22 pages as of the writing of this post.
If you don't want to go through all that. or if you try it and have no luck, then upload the file here (note there is a 128k file size maximum) or to an online file sharing service, like MediaFire or Dropbox is it's too big and post a link to the uploaded file. Information regarding uploading to the forum can be found here

Good luck.

If you have the PDF file you can use the free online service of www.zamzar.com to convert it to an .odt file. Some reformatting may be necessary.

(Sorry. This is not about the real problem but about the subject line only.)

WinWord6 was the shorthand way to talk of Word 6 for Windows where Word 6 originally was either the 1993 version of (MS) Word for DOS or the (also 1993) version for 16-bit-Windows. Mostly the term WinWord6 was used subsequently for the port of that software to the first 32-bit-version of Windows, named Win95. (I don't still know if it actually was converted to 32-bit internally or if it ran in the 16-bit-engine of Win95.)
You see: it's a tale from the Stone Age.

I mention, in the light of Lupp's posting, that I have never found use of WinWord6 format necessary in all my years of using MS Word and (later) OpenOffice.

1. We need to see the faulty file so we an attempt to repair it. Either upload the file to a fileshare site, or email the file to me (I have sent you my email ID by private message). Search the Writer forum with winword or winword6 for similar examples. It may be corrupted beyond repair.

2. Use an un-delete utility like Recuva to try to un-delete the deleted file from the USB stick.

3. Also see [Tutorial] How to find and un-delete AOO temporary files for

a) detailed instructions on how to recover your file as it was when you last opened or saved it, or as it was when it was last saved with AutoRecovery;

b) how to find previous versions of the file in the folder it is located in, but which have since been deleted;

c) how to un-delete the temporary files AOO wrote while you were editing the file, and then deleted. This will recover your file as it was when you last opened it.

If it is posted to the Forum or a downloadable link given, I might (later today) be able to OCR the PDF file to give an editable .odt file.

IlariaSpa sent me the .doc file and I examined it. It has the characteristics of an un-deleted file where the first part of the file up to Hex 00007FF0 has been recovered; but where everything after Hex 00007FF0 has been overwritten.

I therefore advised IlariaSpa that there were three courses of action:

1. Thoroughly search the USB stick for deleted files to see if there is another copy.

2. Convert the PDF back to a .odt. Use a file conversion site like zamzar.com (there are others).

Edit: A better option is probably to get access to Adobe Acrobat and open the PDF with Adobe Acrobat. Now copy out and save the contents. This will preserve the formatting better.

3. Scan the PDF with a OCR system and save the file as a .odt. This should be your last option as it will need a lot of work to tidy up the result.

Unfortunately, IlariaSpa was saving as a .doc file so unless Always save a backup copy and/or AutoRecovery were set to ON, the options to recover a file detailed in [Tutorial] How to find and un-delete AOO temporary files do not work - they only work for .odt and .docx files. Microsoft designed the .doc file so that it is held in, and edited in, memory and thus no temporary files are written during a edit.

If you were editing fred.doc and Tools > Options > Load/Save > General > Always save a backup copy ..., was set to ON, search for fred.bak files in C:\Users\xxxxxx\AppData\Roaming\OpenOffice\4\user\backup\

If you were editing fred.doc and Tools > Options > Load/Save > General > Autorecovery ..., was set to ON, search for fred.doc_0.odt in C:\Users\xxxxxx\AppData\Roaming\OpenOffice\4\user\backup\

See [Tutorial] Differences between Writer and MS Word files for why you should always work in and save files as .odt.