.ODT Corrupted File fix?

[Daliktsuko]

Circumstance:
An ODT file I have been working on over a very long period of time has gone corrupt. I originally started the file a .doc, written under Wordpad, and recently imported it into OpenOffice. It has been working fine for me for almost a year. When I went to open the file today, I received an error message: "The file Name.odt is corrupt and therefore cannot be opened. Should OpenOffice.org repair the file?"

Clicking "yes" gives me the message: General Error: General input/ output error. Clicking no gives the message: "The file Name.odt could not be repaired and therefore can not be opened. I have tried opening it with other programs, and nothing has, so far, worked to open the file. I am running OpenOffice.org ver 3.1.1, on a Vista OS machine.

My question:
Is there a application, or program, that can help me recover the file, or repair it, to the point where I can retrieve the data? I have searched the OpenOffice.org site and forums, but I'll admit I may have overlooked something.

Thank you for taking the time to read this, and for any help or advice anyone might be able to offer.

[Hagar Delest]

Hi and welcome to the forum!

If you rename a copy of the file to .zip, can you open it? You can check your profile for a backup (see [Tutorial] The OOo user profile).

[r4zoli]

Try to rename file extension to zip, and open with an unzipper, if it opens we could help.
If file is broken, can not be extracted, no hope for repairing your file.
You allowed to create backup, under Tools>Options>Load/Save ?
You can search for it in backup folder [Tutorial] The OOo user profile

[Daliktsuko]

Thanks, all.

The file was pretty much broken beyond most repair. Converting into a zip didn't work; it still was too corrupted to even open.

What I eventually wound up doing was downloading a demo of a File Repair Application, using it to retrieve as much as possible of the original, and re-writing over the parts replaced with "demo demo demo demo" by the repair program demo.

Keep up the good work, and thanks again for the help.

~Dalik~

[RoryOF]

One lesson you have perhaps learned from this: turn on Automatic Backups, and always save your file elsewhere at least every day. I note these not really for you, but in the hope that someone else may take note of them and not have this problem.