All my text was replaced by #

[laurenlp]

Hello

Please help me! A very important document that I spent many hours working on has somehow gotten messed up.
My computer restarted for no reason, and when I logged back into Windows the first thing I did was open my document.
When I opened OpenOffice, it asked me for my first and last name and initials. Now whenever I try to open my document, a menu is brought up saying ASCII Filter Options. It asks for Character Set, Default Font, and Language. No matter what I pick my document will only open in read-only, and all of my text has been replaced by a huge wall of ################ symbols! How do I get back everything I wrote?
Please help if anyone knows what happened and how to fix this! I would appreciate it so much.

Thanks
Lauren

[RoryOF]

The chances are minute that you will recover anything from the existing file.

To try and recover your file, you should look in the backup and temporary directories pointed to by /Tools /Options /OpenOffice : Paths. Rename any files in those to type .odt (or whatever file type you were using) and see if they contain your data. Download Recuva or PhotoRec (only one needed) and let it do an indepth recovery of deleted files on your computer. You may get a file containing some or all of your data (or not). Pending running Recuva/PhotoRec make as little use of your computer as possible to avoid overwriting any deleted file.

[John_Ha]

Lauren

See Using Recuva to un-delete Writer temporary files for help recovering the temporary files which Writer wrote while you were editing the file, and then deleted when Writer was closed. With luck you should be able to get back much of the document.

[John_Ha]

When I opened OpenOffice, it asked me for my first and last name and initials.

That means that your profile was corrupted when you had your "incident".

First, try to get back some of the temporary files. Look in "C:\Users\whatever-you-are-called-on-your-PC\AppData\Local\Temp. If there are any folders there called names like sxc5cr.tmp (note that is a folder and not a file! Its name is six? characters followed by .tmp) you are in luck. Go into the folder and unzip any of the files inside the folder with names like sxq9y4.tmp. When you find one which looks like a .odt file, rename it fred.odt and try opening it.

If you do not find any folders called names like sxc5cr.tmp don't despair - they have been deleted, but you can probably un-delete them following the instructions in my earlier post.

Did you have Save a backup set? Have a look in C:\Users\whatever-you-are-called-on-your-PC\AppData\Roaming\OpenOffice\4\user\backup. Are there any files called fred.bak. If so, rename the file to fred.odt and it should open as the file was the previous time you saved it.