help recovering?

users
#1

Hoping for some good news here.
Am using the openSuSE branded version of LibreOffice 3.3.3 OOO330m19
(Build:301) tag libreoffice-3.3.3.1 on openSuSE 11.3 and KDE 4.4.4-1.5.

Was editing a document that is pretty important (to me at least) and during
the process had tried to add a footnote.
I was editing the text in the footnote and almost immediately there was some
flashing of the screen and LibreOffice crashed, locking up the entire PC.
No mouse control, no keyboard control, nothing.
So I had to "reset" the PC.
Now the document is fubar. When I try to open it, LibreOffice attempts to
recover but fails.
Then it tries to repair the file but opens only a blank page.
I've tried to open it without an extension and get a list of a variety of
application types to attempt any modicum of recovery, but no matter what I
try to open it with it either fails, or opens in a file of unreadable
gibberish.
I'd be THRILLED if someone would be able to actually recover this document
for me.
Nothing secret in it, I'd be happy to email it to anyone who'd like to give
it a try. Even just to get back the text out of it so that I could rebuild
would be fabulous.

Any chance at all to recover?

#2

I do not know if this will help, but viewers can be more forgiving than editors.

Try

http://www.officeviewers.com/

or

http://visioo-writer.tuxfamily.org/EN/index_3.html

if it does - you will have to copy & paste back into LO again

you might have to google a few more until you find one that works.

regards

John B

#3

Hi :slight_smile:
If it's saved in odt or docX then you could try opening the file with an archive
manager. I might be able to have a look in Ubuntu using LibreOffice 3.3.2 if
you send me the attachment off-list.
Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

#4

Hi :slight_smile:
It's also not likely that a single app would crash the whole machine like that.
One of the top 3 priorities of Gnu&Linux is that individual processes can fail
without affecting the rest of the system. Hence no Bsods. Is your machine
overheating severly? Are you using a laptop or something with inadequate
cooling? Is your graphics card not pushed in properly or getting extremely
hot? Ram-sticks or cpu? My money would be on the graphics chips over-heating
or wobbly graphics card.

If it is a desktop machine are you confident enough about opening the case and
getting rid of some of the dust without touching any of the components or the
mbord or anything? Which country are you in? In England the normal 3 pin mains
earths the case so even though you would still need to turn off the machine at
the back and at the wall you could remove static from your hands at that point
by touching the case. In the US it could be dangerous to touch the case even
with the power off. The static on your fingers and the oily grease even on
carefully washed hands is enough to damage some components inside the machine so
take care!

Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

#5

...
Open it with archive manager and see if there is any info in
content.xml. Any surviable text should be in that file.

BTW: Do you by chance have an intel graphics card in your system?

#6

Hi,

Hoping for some good news here.
Am using the openSuSE branded version of LibreOffice 3.3.3 OOO330m19
(Build:301) tag libreoffice-3.3.3.1 on openSuSE 11.3 and KDE 4.4.4-1.5.

Was editing a document that is pretty important (to me at least) and during
the process had tried to add a footnote.
I was editing the text in the footnote and almost immediately there was some
flashing of the screen and LibreOffice crashed, locking up the entire PC.
No mouse control, no keyboard control, nothing.
So I had to "reset" the PC.
Now the document is fubar. When I try to open it, LibreOffice attempts to
recover but fails.
Then it tries to repair the file but opens only a blank page.
I've tried to open it without an extension and get a list of a variety of
application types to attempt any modicum of recovery, but no matter what I
try to open it with it either fails, or opens in a file of unreadable
gibberish.
I'd be THRILLED if someone would be able to actually recover this document
for me.
Nothing secret in it, I'd be happy to email it to anyone who'd like to give
it a try. Even just to get back the text out of it so that I could rebuild
would be fabulous.

Any chance at all to recover?

--
View this message in context: http://nabble.documentfoundation.org/help-recovering-tp3191906p3191906.html
Sent from the Users mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

Sorry about the problem. One idea I have is make copy of the file and
change the extension to txt. My idea is that the formatting data would
then be ignored when you open the copy. If it works you may get some
formatting gibberish included with the text.

#7

odt files are zip archives. Changing the extension to txt is almost guaranteed to get you nowhere. If you make a copy and change the extension to .zip, and if you succeed in unzipping it, you will find interesting things in there.

The file Content.xml contains your text with xml stuff, but if you work at it you may be able to extract your data. There may be extractor programs that will do this for you.

The downside in all this is that if the odt file is damaged, the zip archiver may not be able to open it.

I wish you all the luck in the world.

David Teague

#8

odt files are zip archives. Changing the extension to txt is almost
guaranteed to get you nowhere. If you make a copy and change the
extension to .zip, and if you succeed in unzipping it, you will find
interesting things in there.

The file Content.xml contains your text with xml stuff, but if you work
at it you may be able to extract your data. There may be extractor
programs that will do this for you.

The downside in all this is that if the odt file is damaged, the zip
archiver may not be able to open it.

David Teague

Thaks David / Jay,
Indeed the .txt file test yields no help, just gibberish with no
intellegible text.
.zip extenstion shows nothing but a blank when I try to open that with Ark.
Content.xml file? ... isn't this "windows" related? I did a search on the
file and there don't appear to be any file called that on the system.

I do appreciate the effort at help though...

#9

...
Open it with archive manager and see if there is any info in
content.xml. Any surviable text should be in that file.

BTW: Do you by chance have an intel graphics card in your system?

Nope. XFX GEForce 6800 GS 256Mb,

#10

<snip />

.zip extenstion shows nothing but a blank when I try to open that with Ark.
Content.xml file? ... isn't this "windows" related? I did a search on the
file and there don't appear to be any file called that on the system.

I do appreciate the effort at help though...

Hi :slight_smile:
What is the size of the file? Do you have a version that you emailed to
someone, backed-up, pu on usb-stick to share with someone or uploaded somewhere?
Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

#11

Thanks Tom. I understand and that's part of the mystery here. The longer
story is that I've been having problems with the system "spontaneously
resetting" or just freezing up like this for several months. At first, like
many, I cried to myself in my personal system log about the upgrade to 11.3
being the problem, then about KDE being the problem, then about LibreOffice
being the problem, but started to finally realize it cannot be that all the
software suddenly became "buggy". I kind of have to do that. I log my
gripes rather than take them to a forum. After I've read and re-read my
inane whining, I come to other conclusions. <wink>

One of them was the perhaps a memory had failed.
So I bought 2 new sticks about a month ago.
Problems with Firefox have disappeared, it no longer crashes constantly and
the same for several other "unstable" apps I had trouble with. Big
improvement, but I still have trouble keeping specifically LibreOffice
running for some reason and still have this freezing of the machine.
Although the spontaneous reboots have not recurred.

So I am intrigued with the idea that maybe the video card causes this.
I'm going to pull the box open and try reseating it and see what happens
afterward. Of course to know if that works will take some time. And it
won't fix the immediate issue with this specific file, but maybe no further
problems afterward.
I haven't had luck with it so I'll send that along to you off list and hope
for the best.

BTW the cautions you give are well taken. But I'm an intermediate level hack
w/ the PC. Been a PC hardware/software junkie since Kaypro 486 days and DOS
2.2. But that was before I saw the light and jumped on the Linux wagon.
I've built several PC's over the years, this PC from scratch about 4 or 5
years ago and it's been very reliable and worked great until just recently.
The graphics card in this one is XFX GEForce 6800 GS 256Mb and isn't very
old. Maybe one year or less.
I keep the dust off things internally about 2 or 3 times a year as the PC is
in a clear arcylic case so it's easy to see when she's dirtied up. So the
card fan can be observed functional and not terribly dusty at this time but
it may benefit from being reseated. I'll do that and see what happens going
forward.
Thanks for that suggestion.

Tom Davies wrote:

#12

Thanks John.
Officeviewers seems "Windows" related, no such stuff on my systems here.
I've declared it illegal to have in my home.
Didn't have any luck w/ visioo-writer. Could not make it compile.
But I apprecate the idea.

Thanks!

John B-2 wrote:

#13

Thanks for making a stab at this Tom.

Here is the file. Was saved as a common text file originally with
Kwrite so it had no file extension.
Subsequently I got more complex with it and started edit it in
LibreOffice. So I have to assume it saved as an .odt file, but the
extension was never shown.

Steve (aka JeepNut)

#14

The archive manager uses other archive utilities to actually manipulate archives.

Try using 7zip directly if that is on your system.

It has a test option. It will test the document for integrity and also report on what files are in it.

*Inside* of the document package there will be a content.xml file. If that file is present and is reported to be correct, you can extract it.

7zip has a command line operation (named 7z or 7za).

Here's an example using a command line and 7za.exe in a Windows console session:

C:\command>7za t OOo-CustomProp-Export-2011-07-21-1613.odt

7-Zip (A) 4.42 Copyright (c) 1999-2006 Igor Pavlov 2006-05-14

Processing archive: OOo-CustomProp-Export-2011-07-21-1613.odt

Testing mimetype
Testing Configurations2\statusbar
Testing Configurations2\accelerator\current.xml
Testing Configurations2\floater
Testing Configurations2\popupmenu
Testing Configurations2\progressbar
Testing Configurations2\toolpanel
Testing Configurations2\menubar
Testing Configurations2\toolbar
Testing Configurations2\images\Bitmaps
Testing content.xml
Testing manifest.rdf
Testing styles.xml
Testing meta.xml
Testing Thumbnails\thumbnail.png
Testing settings.xml
Testing META-INF\manifest.xml

Everything is Ok

C:\command>7za e OOo-CustomProp-Export-2011-07-21-1613.odt content.xml

7-Zip (A) 4.42 Copyright (c) 1999-2006 Igor Pavlov 2006-05-14

Processing archive: OOo-CustomProp-Export-2011-07-21-1613.odt

Extracting content.xml

Everything is Ok

C:\command>

The content.xml file will be in XML markup format. There is a *lot* of markup. it is tricky to remove the markup and leave just the text.

If a Zip utility will not access the document, or reports that it is corrupt, you may need to track down a Zip repair utility. I have no experience with those and can make no recommendation.

- Dennis

#15

Hi :slight_smile:
Hmmm. If the graphics card has been there for about a year then that's probably
not the issue. If it was older then maybe it's fan might have stopped working
and the machine shuts down when the gpu overheats. If the crashes had been
happening ever since putting the new card in then wobbly card might make sense.
Reseating the card might fix the issue but it's not as likely to be the problem
as i first thought given that it's about a year or so since you put the card
in.

When you boot into openSUSE do you get a boot menu with choices such as mem-test
and "recovery mode". Recovery mode has a few house-keeping type clean-up tools
such as clearing temp folders and caches and checking dependencies. Mem-test
keeps running if given a chance but just 1 or 2 tests and a single pass should
be enough. Press Esc to reboot rather than let it run too long. I don't think
those are the problems but it's probably worth checking.

I think the best chance is to use something like GPartEd to check the partitions
and to create a new partition large enough to put a fresh install of openSUSE or
another distro on. Then see if the new fresh install has the same problem with
crashing.
Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

#16

Because I really like closure, thought I would post the resolution to the
problem of the file I lost.
Admittedly a fairly unsophisticated user of the office suite, I overlooked a
very easy answer to the problem of recovering the file that crashed and
ended up being completely empty....

Find the backup copy.

I didn't even realize one existed! But after continuing to review posts in
this excellent forum and getting a few ideas here and there about how to
stabilize my also-frequently-crashing office suite, I became aware of the
option in the Tools / Options menu that allows for a backup copy to be
saved. Once I found the Paths option and located the hidden subfolders
where backups and various other LibreOffice system files are saved, I
discovered (to my great joy!) the most recent backed up copy of that trashed
file!

I thank all the folks that attempted to recover the document and offered
suggestions.
But in this case, the simplest answer of all seems to have been just
overlooked by everyone.
It's a complex set of tools and software, so it's not surprising that there
is a lot to learn if one wants to become a proficient user. The experience
and subsequent follow-up has taught me a lot.

I just really appreciate the hard work and dedication of the entire team of
folks who have made this open source solution even POSSIBLE and I thank you
all for your continued efforts at improving it.

Overall satisfactory and very beneficial results have been achieved.

#17

congrats for getting it back in one piece

#18

Hi

Because I really like closure, thought I would post the resolution to the
problem of the file I lost.
Admittedly a fairly unsophisticated user of the office suite, I overlooked a
very easy answer to the problem of recovering the file that crashed and
ended up being completely empty....

Find the backup copy.

I didn't even realize one existed! But after continuing to review posts in
this excellent forum and getting a few ideas here and there about how to
stabilize my also-frequently-crashing office suite, I became aware of the
option in the Tools / Options menu that allows for a backup copy to be
saved. Once I found the Paths option and located the hidden subfolders
where backups and various other LibreOffice system files are saved, I
discovered (to my great joy!) the most recent backed up copy of that trashed
file!

I thank all the folks that attempted to recover the document and offered
suggestions.
But in this case, the simplest answer of all seems to have been just
overlooked by everyone.
It's a complex set of tools and software, so it's not surprising that there
is a lot to learn if one wants to become a proficient user. The experience
and subsequent follow-up has taught me a lot.

I just really appreciate the hard work and dedication of the entire team of
folks who have made this open source solution even POSSIBLE and I thank you
all for your continued efforts at improving it.

Overall satisfactory and very beneficial results have been achieved.

--
View this message in context: http://nabble.documentfoundation.org/help-recovering-tp3191906p3211104.html
Sent from the Users mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

Thanks for the comments, sometimes one needs to look for the simplest
answer first.

#19

Hi :slight_smile:
+1
Congrats at fixing it and thanks for posting the right answer back into this
thread. There are a lot of people working hard on LibreOffice and they seldom
get much thanks so it's great to hear it.
Thanks and congrats from
Tom :slight_smile: