On 05/12/2011 04:11 AM, Kara Samantha Mcdermott wrote:
Alright. My College Thesis has been "corrupted." I am not fooling
around here. My college education is at stake, and I am unamused, I
have my document, and it is is bringing up the "ASCII" shenanigans. It
has been corrupted- alright. I need it to be fixed. My thesis is due,
Friday.
My guess is that you are an undergraduate English major.
I have many people working on fixing it, to no avail. OpenOffice has
ruined my college education.
Ideas to find newer copies:
Ask your adviser for their last review copy.
If you emailed a copy, check your sent your box. I know many people that
use email as off-site storage for very important documents, and the
email out box (depending on the email client) as secondary storage in a
different location.
It is corrupted, without fixing. The best that anyone can do is pull
up an old, seriously un-revised copy from months ago. I have a few
issues.
A. Why did this happen?
Any answer is highly speculative.
I inspected your document with a binary editor and it is nothing but
zeros. I have seen this two times. In both cases, a drive failure
occurred while the file was being written to disk. I cannot speculate,
but, if you noticed something "bad" while saving the document (OOo
crashed, Windows locked, etc), that may provide a clue.
B. Why can't I pull up an old copy? I saved hundreds of times, today
alone.
My guess is that you always saved to the same file. If the file is
damaged while the file is being saved, then the good file is
over-written by junk. I have never experienced this, well, not with OOo
anyway. Also, if there is a bad sector on your hard drive where the file
was stored, then that file may not be recoverable using normal means.
With my my last hard drive failure (last month), I lost everything on
that drive. The failure before that, I only lost about 20 files that
occupied areas of the disk that were no longer readable.
Side Note:
Assume that your drive will fail and backup important data. The drive
may be fine, but it also may not be. If you have a techno-nerdy friend,
ask them if they know how to check the SMART information on the drive.
Most drives these days are able to notice and report errors. My Linux
computer does a dandy job of this; my Windows computer not so much. When
I last lost everything, it was on a Windows computer that never said a
word until the drive was unusable and the problem manifested itself as a
read error. An inspection of the Windows event log showed that the drive
had been reporting numerous errors long before the drive failed.
Ironically, it was the backup drive that failed so I did not even suffer
down time on that failure.
C. I will not graduate now, because I will not be able to hand this in.
There is no fixing this. No apology will be good enough.
Approach your professor and academic adviser to assess the impact on
your graduation and on the diploma. Interested in the final results.
Kara McDermott
--
Andrew Pitonyak
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