[Solved] OOo Writer problems - PLEASE HELP !

[aheidema]

I was banging away at an essay very early this morning when suddenly, for whatever reason, OO Writer stalled. It had done this a few times before in the hours previous but it had always recovered on its own without even requiring anything from me. This time was not to be, however.

I was forced to shut the program down (note: I had recently installed the newest version of OO) and restart. In shutting down, the program dutifully responded by informing me that "it was saving my work due to an unexpected crash and that document recovery would automatically begin the next time I started OO Writer."

When Writer next started, the program attempted to recover my document, which it apparently did successfully but unfortunately, before I could be taken to the page asking me to fill out information surrounding the circumstances of the crash, a new window appeared telling me that another crash had occurred and that it would once again save my work before restarting.

This has now turned into a frustrating loop everytime I attempt to open either OO Writer or the document itself. I automatically get the first window saying that the program will attempt to recover my document (which it always does, sucessfully, every time) but instead of then allowing me to proceed to my document, I get another window informing me that a crash has occurred and that my work will be saved. I have not been able to break this sequence and fear that the only way to do this would be to click the cancel button before starting the recovery of the document. However, I don't want to do this since I am afraid I will lose the whole thing in its original form completely.

With the last sentence, I inferred that I still had the document which I am trying to access, which I do. In attempting to get it back by trying to load it into other word processors as well as different versions of OO writer, I have even SEEN it a couple of times (for a few brief seconds) before getting the notification screen that the program has crashed and that my document will be saved. I made a copy onto a USB memory stick and brought it to an internet cafe where my attempts to recall it were unsuccessful. While they did data recovery, I was informed that, because this had to do with only one file (and not the whole OS), they did not know how to stop the vicious loop. It was suggested that I attempt to use certain internet tools to recover and/or repair the data but out of the ten or 15 I have so far tried, none of them have succeeded either.

Would anyone out there have any idea how to solve this problem ? I am pretty desperate at the moment (as well as frustrated and panicked) since my essay is already overdue and, after what I have gone through already to get this far, I would probably kill myself before having to do it all over again. ANY assistance, or further recommendations for other third-party assistance, would be VERY much appreciated !

Thank you very much !

[TerryE]

Step one here is to make copies of your document in its latest and any previously saved form (using copy or cp depending on whether you are using Windows or Linux). Make these readonly. Make a working copy of the one you can open.

If you open an ODT file using Winzip or equivalent you will see that it contains a bunch of XML files. The main one which contains the content of your document is content.xml. Sometimes you can simply copy the content.xml from the corrupt ODT into the working copy and this will recover the basic content. Sometimes the XML is malformed (usually because the write aborted when part complete. In this case its a case of picking out what chunks you can, and merging across the content whilst keeping the XML tags correctly paired. Once you've done this, then you make be able to recover the content. You may then need to tidy it up.

But at the end of the day this remains a bit of a black art. The moral is to keep regular backups of your document, because any form of failure could cause loss of work. Let me us know if you have any luck.

[aheidema]

Terry, you are my saving grace (at least tonight, anyway) and I can't thank you enough for your help. I had no idea about the Winzip thing and when I did as you said, there it was, in its entirety. Granted, it was unformatted at least it was there and now, after an hour or so of removing all the formatting tabs, the document is as it was.

Thanks again for your help ! I hope I can remember not to put as much faith in my computer/programs and to save more often than I usually do.

Have a great week !