[Hint] How did I fix my ODT file

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user32283
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Re: [Hint] How did I fix my ODT file

Post by user32283 »

I just wanted to share how I was able to fix my .ods file with the same problem.

You'll need to use an XML editor, I used Notepad++.

BEFORE ANYTHING: make a backup of your spreadsheet just in case you make a mistake.

1. Change the extension of your .ods spreadsheet to .zip.

2. Open the spreadsheet file that is now a .zip file and extract the "content.xml" file.

3. Open the spreadsheet* file using OO calc and when the error message pops up, take note of the column it says the error is located at (For example, it will say the error is at " Line 2, 343124". The one you need to know is the "343124")

5. Open Notepad++ and click on "File > Open" and select the content.xml file.

6. Press ctrl+g, click on the "Offset" radio button, and enter the column number that you took note of when you opened OOc and it gave you the error.

7. Notepad++ will highlight the line of code at that column that OOc said the error was occurring at. Select that line of code and delete it.

8. Save the content.xml file and copy it to the zip file.

9. Open the spreadsheet*[*][/color] and see if the error is gone. If it is not, it should tell you another line of that needs to be fixed. In that case, repeat steps 3-9.

You can right click the .zip file and "Open with..." and select OpenOffice Calc to save you time

I hope this helps someone. I thank you guys on this thread for getting me on the right track to fixing my spreadsheet file. You guys are lifesavers.
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Smontage
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Re: [Hint] How did I fix my ODT file

Post by Smontage »

Hello, I recently managed to get a highly important .odt file corrupted on my flash drive which had not been backed up for a couple of weeks.

Losing this file means hours of lost work (it is a book I am writing). I have tried various repair tools which I found recommended online but none worked - PartitionViewer, XVI32 HexViewer and also a few of the methods proposed in this thread. I did manage to get as far as decompressing the .odt file into its constituent .xml files but I was not even able to open content.xml as people suggest doing in this thread. I understand that that is pretty dire news, so I thought as a last ditch effort to recover my data I would upload the file here for any of you generous mods to take a look at; the help you've been providing in this thread has really blown me away.

So here is the file I wish to recover, http://www.mediafire.com/?sm1jt2f1x0f01co. The main problem I'm getting when trying to interact with this file using OOo is 'Data of manifest.rdf could not be read.' I encounter a similar error when directly trying to open the content.xml file.

Any help would be much appreciated, my thanks in advance.

~Smontage
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RoryOF
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Re: [Hint] How did I fix my ODT file

Post by RoryOF »

Too late here and I'm using the wrong operating system to try but have a look at
http://www.craig.copperleife.com/tech/crc_error.htmp
for detailed discussion on methods of repairing (or attempting to repair) a zip file with bad CRC.

The file you need to concentrate on is content.xml, as it contains your text. The formatting is a minor detail.
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acknak
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Re: [Hint] How did I fix my ODT file

Post by acknak »

Smontage wrote:...So here is the file I wish to recover, ...
I'm able to get about the first 10-15% of the text, up to the sentence
Miss Tompkins and the other ladies at church were fragile, breakable, ghosts of women.
Beyond that, it's a near-complete hash.

If you want that part, just yell; I'm guessing that bit isn't going to help much.
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Charlie Young
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Re: [Hint] How did I fix my ODT file

Post by Charlie Young »

acknak wrote:
Smontage wrote:...So here is the file I wish to recover, ...
I'm able to get about the first 10-15% of the text, up to the sentence
Miss Tompkins and the other ladies at church were fragile, breakable, ghosts of women.
Beyond that, it's a near-complete hash.

If you want that part, just yell; I'm guessing that bit isn't going to help much.
I've got 40 pages, ending with

Code: Select all

‘I am black and therefore you can do what you like with me.’ 
Since I don't find Acknak's text in a search, I'm guessing he has more.

I first unzipped the file with 7Zip, then played around with the content.xml in a text editor, deleting sections until the rezipped file loaded in Writer. It's quite possible that such an approach would be more successful if one could isolate the corrupted part more carefully.
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Smontage
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Re: [Hint] How did I fix my ODT file

Post by Smontage »

You guys are something else - how did you even get content.xml from that file to open by the way?

I really appreciate your help, anything you have recovered could still save me hours. Acknack and Charlie Young, could you paste what you found to me in a PM? I had lost all hope on this one, so even 'just' 15-20% is very meaningful to me; what you have recovered could be crucial.

Thank you so much!!
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acknak
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Re: [Hint] How did I fix my ODT file

Post by acknak »

Here's what I have ...
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CorruptNovel_recovered.odt
(59.26 KiB) Downloaded 6097 times
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fredd_vander
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Re: [Hint] How did I fix my ODT file

Post by fredd_vander »

acknak wrote:Here's what I have ...
I can read the all content of this file. Why cannot you? :ugeek:
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Hagar Delest
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Re: [Hint] How did I fix my ODT file

Post by Hagar Delest »

It's the recovered version.
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Iris88
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Re: [Hint] How did I fix my ODT file

Post by Iris88 »

searching with Google I came along this forum and saw that some of you managed to recover a corrupted file. I have a file from my 13yo daughter who is writing a story. She has been working on it for weeks and wrote about 80 pages and now suddenly the file is corrupted:-( She works on an old laptop with Ubuntu, but because it has no internet, I copied the file on a USB stick and transferred it to my Mac. I tried several things on both computers, like zipping and unzipping, changing the extention in different things, but nothing seems to work. So you are my last hope I guess... I attached the file, it is in Dutch, I hope you can help me/her!
Attachments
Nieuw verhaal 2.odt
(62.05 KiB) Downloaded 6229 times
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RoryOF
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Re: [Hint] How did I fix my ODT file

Post by RoryOF »

I'm getting nothing from your file. Sorry! Perhaps someone else will have better luck.
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Iris88
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Re: [Hint] How did I fix my ODT file

Post by Iris88 »

Thanks for trying anyway!
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Re: [Hint] How did I fix my ODT file

Post by RoryOF »

In OpenOffice /Tools /Options /Load-Save : General, tick the "Always create backup copy" checkbox. This won't help with current file, but may be useful in future. Tell your daughter that a good author will rewrite a story to get it "just so". She has to rewrite just that bit sooner, unfortunately.
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Iris88
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Re: [Hint] How did I fix my ODT file

Post by Iris88 »

Yes, that checkbox is checked now, I found out about when searching for this problem... She is prepared to start all over and I think that I think worse about than she does in fact ;-)
She has started this afternoon with the parts she remembers best. Thanks for the advice!
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acknak
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Re: [Hint] How did I fix my ODT file

Post by acknak »

Iris88 wrote:... I attached the file, it is in Dutch, I hope you can help me/her!
I was able to recover ~ 58 pages of text from your file.

All the settings and so forth are gone, so (for example) the language setting in the recovered file is wrongly set to English. I'm not sure what is the best way to fix that.
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Nieuw verhaal 2_recovered.odt
(56.85 KiB) Downloaded 6159 times
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Re: [Hint] How did I fix my ODT file

Post by floris v »

Good job! How did you manage that? A zip repair tool set everything to zero. And 7zip couldn't even open the archive - it was too badly damaged.
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Re: [Hint] How did I fix my ODT file

Post by acknak »

I manually picked out the content.xml part of the archive and de-zipped it. Only part of the file was present, but what was there expanded into clean xml. I added the tags needed to close up the xml and zipped the recovered content.xml into an existing .odt file to make the uploaded document.

Not as much trouble as it sounds--it took me longer to explain it here than it did to do it ;-)
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Hagar Delest
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Re: [Hint] How did I fix my ODT file

Post by Hagar Delest »

What do you use for unzipping? That's usually where it fails on my Ubuntu...
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Re: [Hint] How did I fix my ODT file

Post by floris v »

On Windows Vista as well. I don't have anything that can open that file.
 Edit: Just installed WinZip and even that can't even open it - it claims that it's an invalid file. 
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Re: [Hint] How did I fix my ODT file

Post by acknak »

Would it be worth putting together a tutorial thread, or maybe even a sub-forum just dealing with ODF files & repair methods? I can think of several related topics that might be useful.

ODF & zip/jar file structure (mostly links)
Unpacking ODF archives
Packing ODF archives
Repairing ODF archives on Linux
Repairing ODF archives on Windows
Repairing ODF archives on Mac
Avoiding broken files/lost work
Recovering files after an OOo crash
Brainstorming ideas for making OOo more robust/less likely to lose work
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Re: [Hint] How did I fix my ODT file

Post by Hagar Delest »

That would be a good idea indeed! Very often we are asked about XML parsers for example.
 Edit: 1 topic should be enough. 
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Re: [Hint] How did I fix my ODT file

Post by floris v »

Just a tutorial thread (with as many posts as you'd care to write) would IMHO probably be good enough.
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dqtc
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Re: [Hint] How did I fix my ODT file

Post by dqtc »

Hi all pro,

I have problem about openoffice.

" Openoffice.org 3.2
Format error discovered in the file in sub-document content.xml at 2,3076867 ( row, col)."

The detail is attach file.

http://www.mediafire.com/?...

Thanks
Hai.Duong
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Hagar Delest
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Re: [Hint] How did I fix my ODT file

Post by Hagar Delest »

Have you tried already the methods described here?
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Re: [Hint] How did I fix my ODT file

Post by acknak »

Yes, it's a very simple problem to fix. PM or email me if you need help.

I've edited the link, as the file itself contains some (possibly) private info.
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Re: [Hint] How did I fix my ODT file

Post by marussel »

G'day Acknak,

Hi! My daily office report got corrupted for some reason. I tried deleting the styles and formats of the corrupted file but when I opened the new file I've created, it only has some computer texts in the screen. Do you think you can try fixing it? I'll be really grateful if you could. Error message is:

Format error discovered in the file in the sub document content.xml at 2, 1290341(row, col).

Regards,
Russel
Attachments
HD [Daily Report] 01 Dec. 2012 - Pernites, Marussel A..ods
(120.85 KiB) Downloaded 5905 times
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acknak
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Re: [Hint] How did I fix my ODT file

Post by acknak »

Very odd corruption in this one, although not too bad to fix.

Check (and fix) the formula in Daily.X182; I had to guess at what the formula should be. To mark the cell, I intentionally modified the function name to _sum. You should check the formula and fix the name once the formula is correct.

Any recovered file could have other problems: check it all over very carefully before you use it.
Attachments
HD [Daily Report] 01 Dec. 2012 - Pernites, Marussel A_recovered.ods
(122.42 KiB) Downloaded 6040 times
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Re: [Hint] How did I fix my ODT file

Post by marussel »

Dear Acknak,

Sweet! Thanks a lot, you're a life saver, you're a blessing to the world! God bless you, advance happy new year and merry christmas, may you your life be filled with happiness and love!

Regards,
Marussel
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Re: [Hint] How did I fix my ODT file

Post by marussel »

Dear Acknak,

Hi. It seems that it happened again. I saved my daily report but then when I opened it up yesterday, it won't load. I deleted the styles, but it is still a mumbo jumbo when I opened it. Maybe you can fix it again? I am switching to xls format as advised to me by my superiors.

Regards,
Marussel
Attachments
HD [Daily Report] 15 December 2012 - Pernites, Marussel A..rar
(68.87 KiB) Downloaded 5752 times
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RoryOF
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Re: [Hint] How did I fix my ODT file

Post by RoryOF »

You are possibly closing down your computer too quickly, which doesn't allow file buffers to finish writing to disk.

Good luck with .xls format - your superiors may have to buy MS Office if you need to do any serious work using .xls.
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