Hi 
Most serious data-recovery experts would first advise to stop using the
drive at all. Data-recovery experts would work on a clone or image of the
drive instead of the original.
That may mean stopping using the machine itself unless you are experienced
with "Live Cd/Usb" sessions or if you can unplug the hard-drive and still
run the machine. If the data is valuable then take the drive to a
professional data-recovery service. it might be wise to get a foil bag or
just wrap the drive in silver foil to avoid any slightest static charges
doing any further damage in transit.
If you are experienced with LiveCd/Usb or can be absolutely certain you can
boot without any more read/writes happening to/from the drive then step 1
is to image the drive. Once you have cloned the drive then shut the
machine down and unplug the damaged drive to make sure no changes happen to
that one. All recovery efforts would be done to the clone/image NOT the
original!
From the reported problem it sounds more like hard-drive failure than
anything else. This typically happens to either ultra-new drives or
ancient ones. If a drive is going to fail it usually does so in the first
few months. If it survives that then it usually lasts for years assuming
it doesn't get physically bashed around. If the drive is doing read/writes
at a time when it gets shaken or receives a jolt or impact then that could
damage the read/write heads or the surface of the platters. SSDs are
better at surviving under those conditions. With external drives it is
important to unplug the leads from the drive itself during transit as the
connection between the drive and the lead is vulnerable to knocks. Even if
the lead has become unreliable a proper data-recovery service will probably
be able to recover the data.
When you uninstall OpenOffice and then install LibreOffice the operating
system will usually pick-up all the settings and configurations you had set
with OpenOffice. Normally when you try to open LibreOffice it tries to
recover the last files you were working on when you last closed it (or
OpenOffice). It is possible to "get back to factory defaults" but doing an
uninstall-reinstall is not the way to do that. It's been a decade or so
since that was a good way to get any program back to factory defaults.
As for grabbing the file-associations for MS formats that would only happen
if you didn't have MS Office already claiming those files. Any files that
were set to open with OpenOffice would have their file-associations left
hanging when you uninstall OpenOffice and LibreOffice would grab those
ones. Otherwise all your files would be unable to be opened by any program
until after you had selected each file-type in turn and specifically told
it which program to open with.
The described problem sounds extremely unlikely to have happened in real
life. If it really did happen and if it had happened to me i would be
checking the physical connections of the hard-drives to make sure the wires
were plugged in properly. In normal usage i am fairly aware of any unusual
sounds that my hard-drive makes so i would probably have been more aware of
an imminent failure.
Other ways to recover files is to look for back-ups, perhaps older copies
on external drives, usb-sticks, Cd, Dvd, emails, network file-shares and
other machines where you might have worked on the files. Perhaps check
temp or tmp folders.
Regards from
Tom
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