Apache OpenOffice Community Forum

Hello!
I have a very big problem. An important .odt file is corrupted. I have tried various methods proposed in various topic, but nothing works . 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 have no idea about what to do, here is the file (called "Appunti presi a lezione") please help me

Welcome to the forum

I am sorry but your odt file is corrupted and even trying to fix it (odt files are actually zip files and I used a ZIP Repair Utility) did not recover any useful information.

There is a long discussion in this post [Hint] How did I fix my ODT file

No-one knows why this happens but shutting down a PC before AOO has finished writing the oft file is one possible way. You should always have backups of any important files. Tools > Options > OpenOffice > Load Save allows you to tell AOO to keep a backup copy (the previous saved version) and to AutoSave while you are editing to reduce the risk of losing data.

I did manage to get as far as decompressing the .odt file into its constituent .xml files

Have a look at the xml file with a hex editor (I use HxD) - can you see anything? How big is it? My ZIP utility said it was about 50kB compressed and 400kB uncompressed but I could not separate it and save it as an xml file.
Can you post the xml file for someone to have a look (128kB max here, or use a file share site).

Here's all I could get from it.

There's some garbled content that I pasted at the end of the document. It looks pretty badly damaged but maybe you can get something out of it.

thank you so much, acknak and John_Ha.

To give some advice on the subject of corrupt OpenOffice files: if you regularly get corrupt OpenOffice files, you need to examine why. Is your machine unstable (i.e., crashing)? Are you closing down the machine too quickly: for example, snapping the lid shut immediately after exiting OpenOffice? You may need to review your method of working etc to avoid bad habits like this.

If you get corrupt files, it is worth having installed a recovery/undelete utility, such as PhotoRec or Recuva. The sooner one of these is run after a corruption is discovered, the more chance of getting a temporary or previous file undeleted, because it may not yet have been overwritten by the file system. Also worth checking the backup folder and the temporary folder, but my instinct would be to get an undeleter going before anything else.