LO 1:4.2-8-0ubuntu on Xubuntu 14.04, up to date I have used LO (and formerly OO) on Ubuntu for ten years, and there has rarely been a problem.
Suddenly LO Writer would not open either of two files that I had been working on. The error message popup said: The file 'filename.odt' is corrupt and therefore cannot be opened. LibreOffice can try to repair the file. The corruption could be the result of document manipulation or of structural document damage due to data transmission. We recommend that you do not trust the content of the repaired document. Execution of macros is disabled for this document. Should LibreOffice repair the file? Clicking on YES got the popup: The file 'filename.odt' could not be repaired and therefore cannot be opened. This popup had only an OK button, and clicking on it got another popup: General error. The files were stored on a hard disk that was at the end of its warranty and I was considering replacing it, so there is a possibility that the files really were corrupt. But the disk had 4TB of other data on it and none of it had appeared corrupted (yet), so I must conclude that corruption is a possibility, but not necessarily true. At this point I copied the files from the suspect disk to a different drive (mSATA), and then tried to open them from there. But at this point Writer would not open at all. Writer and everything else is on the mSATA drive; the suspect drive is an external USB drive that is used strictly for data. On trying to open Writer the error message was that Default.ott was corrupt and do I want to try to repair it. Regardless of whether I said Yes or No, I got a message "The file "Default.ott" could not be repaired and therefore cannot be opened." There is only one button on the message, "OK," and when I click on it I get a "General error" popup message, and when I tried to open Writer again it would not even try to open - nothing happened at all. However, the other components of the suite (Impress, Draw, Calc, etc. all continued to open normally. I reinstalled all components of LO, but it made no difference. I searched for "Default.ott" and navigated to it, where I then renamed it by appending -old to the filename. Afterwards Writer opened, but bitched about there not being a Default.ott file. It looked the same as before (I have a lot of custom toolbar and other viewing settings), except that the page view was full page where I had always set it to page width. No big deal. So then I tried to open the supposedly corrupt files again, but I got the same error messages as before. I have backups of the files, but they were made last night and also would not open. These files are lists of things and are constantly being added to, so really old backups would be useless. In an effort to save the data I decided to see if I could open them in Abiword. That was successful and the data looked fine (except the table formatting was messed up), so I saved them from Abiword in .odt format, but this failed with the error message "Error saving the document Untitled1: Write Error. Error in writing sub-document content.xml. So then I decided to see if I could export the file, starting with PDF as probably the least problematic. The export started and the progress bar got about halfway, and then Writer locked up. There was nothing to do except kill it and start over. I relaunched Writer, opened the .abw file, and this time tried to export as Writer Layout XML. This time I got a different error message: "Error saving the document <filename> Resource exhausted. No more space on device. The device has over 100 GB of free space. I decided to see if I could fix the damage that Abiword had done to the table column widths, but in the middle of this suddenly the status bar in Writer started flashing and I couldn't click on anything to close the document or exit Writer - in other words, Writer had gone into a loop that was taking all CPU processes. I killed Writer, and then restarted it. At that point it was getting too late and I was out of ideas, so I decided to post this message and go to bed. In the morning my bran may have come up with other ideas and maybe someone here will have some suggestions. And I know that my data is all still there since I can open the files in Abiword, so it is merely a problem to be figured out, not a disaster. -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: users+unsubscr...@global.libreoffice.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/users/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted