If the password is entered wrong, usually the first file that is decrypted with that password will fail a checksum check and there will be a pretty-immediate failure.
If one of the files is corrupted, its decryption will fail the checksum check after some amount of decryption of other parts of the document have happened. It might still treat it as a password error, even though the password has been working until the particular part of the ODF document fails. If the software offers to attempt to recover, you should try it. (I suspect it is not designed to do that in this case.) One thing you can do with the file that fails is try to open it with a Zip utility and run a test on it. If the Zip tests all right, it means the corruption occurred during encryption, not later, during writing. If the Zip indicates any part of the document is corrupted, you might see if a Zip repair utility can help. The corruption could be in the key information rather than in the file (which would be very bad, since there is almost no way to recover if that is the case). If the corruption is in the file, the form of encryption used tends to limit mistakes (that is, things tend to go right again after a while). Because the decrypted file is a compressed stream inside of a Zip, decompression can also go off the rails. But it may be possible to recover whatever there is. But at this point, password recovery won't help because your password is not the problem. It takes some serious forensic tools to now attempt a recovery, and I don't know who might have those that work with the encryptions that are used for ODF documents. You may also be able to find a backup of the unencrypted file on your system. You should look for that. Also, if you can reconstruct from an earlier version of the file, that would be good. JeepNut was able to find a backup to recover a seriously-corrupted file (crash during save) in a post last Friday. Look in Tools | Options | LibreOffice | Paths and see where the Backups are in the list of Paths used by LibreOffice. You might also be able to find something in Temporary files (that's a stretch). - Dennis -----Original Message----- From: Bill Gradwohl [mailto:b...@ycc.com] Sent: Thursday, August 04, 2011 20:54 To: users@global.libreoffice.org Subject: Re: [libreoffice-users] password problem -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 08/04/2011 08:44 PM, Bob Stia wrote: > I have a document that I have had for years. Time to time I must open it, > edit > it and close it again. It is Libreoffice password protected. A few days ago > I opened the fdocument and then after editing closed it agaim. The other > night I tried to open it again and the password failed. Bob Look at what happens carefully. Even experiment on another test doc to see a slight difference that may be significant. I've experienced password failures on password protected documents part way through the loading process after it successfully took my password and then manufactured a bogus password failure message a certain distance into the loading process. The password failure messages are different depending on if you really keyed in a wrong password or it pops up a bogus message. Create a test document, password protect it and then ATTEMPT to open it with a bad password. Is that the password message your real doc is getting or is it another one? The other one is a bogus message after the file's been corrupted. I noticed this on a large spreadsheet that takes quite a while to load. It would take my password, start to load, and then fail some seconds later on some internal error and puts up a bogus message. - -- Bill Gradwohl Roatan, Honduras 504 9 899 2652 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.11 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Fedora - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iEYEARECAAYFAk47aXAACgkQ7Orvev+eC8o8WwCdErYUa/D+UaQMXVCz6fhBx23d gkkAnAwrgPvGI5DvA4LzHSh6S7XlXCCC =L4Ox -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- For unsubscribe instructions e-mail to: users+h...@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 -- For unsubscribe instructions e-mail to: users+h...@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
