Opening a corrupt file

[dwhims]

Good morning!

I'm new to the Technical Issues forum, but am quite the admirer of this site and have received quite a bit of useful information from other Mr. Excel boards. Hope you can help me out with this one.

I have a user who has a number of files on a floppy disk. Mind you, this is not a backup disk, but the only copy of these files. While the system was saving one of these files, he jumped the gun and ejected the disk while it was still saving. Now, not only is that file corrupt, but the entire disk appears to be corrupted.

We played around with a number of things, including check disk, disk copy, and quite a few other things, and got the disk to the point where we can see the file names, and can even open one or two of the files, but the rest still give us the error:

'Schedule.xls' cannot be accessed. The file may be read-only, or you may be trying to access a read-only location. Or the server the document is stored on may not be responding.

Does anyone know any way around this error?

Thanks, and Happy Holidays!

 

[XL-Dennis]

HI,

Is it possible to copy all the files to a harddrive?

If so then You might try to open the corrupted files in XL 2002 or XL 2003 if You have one of the versions available. Both versions have a good built-in recover tool.

If not then You may try to open the files in StarCalc (part of StarOffice) or OpenCalc (part of OpenOffice)

OpenOffice-suit - freeware:
http://www.openoffice.org/

There also exist some commercial softwares like ExcelFix:
http://www.cimaware.com/excelfix.html

MS knowledge base has a good article about the subject:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;179871

Good luck!

Season greetings from,
Dennis

 

[dwhims]

Dennis,

Thanks for your suggestions. Unfortunately, none of them did the trick for me. Best we were able to do was to open the file, which had the right number of rows and columns, but no data.

Guess my user just learned a couple of valuable lessons: (1) keep a copy on the hard drive; and (2) keep your hands away from the eject button.

At least I hope he learned!

Thanks again, and have a great New Year!
Debbie

 

[XL-Dennis]

Debbie,

Sorry to hear but a god lesson also for other members here on the board who's reading this thread :wink:

Season greetings,
Dennis

 

[Ivan F Moala]

Debbie,

Sorry to hear but a god lesson also for other members here on the board who's reading this thread :wink:

Season greetings,
Dennis

Aye, lesson learnt a long time ago

In fact, I lost my hard drive not too long ago and ALL my work...guess what
NO BACK UP !!! Fortunately, I had files @ work and on another computer
although they were old. Now I backup to my laptop, Memory stick and CD.
Why is it we leanr the hard way

 

[XL-Dennis]

Hi CM Ivan,

True - I believe that most of us have learned the lesson sometime...

Nowdays I daily backup my work on a separate hdd and on a monthly basis I also ghost the system.

Why is it we leanr the hard way

...and I believe that´s the only way we are able to learn...

Take care and try to make backups
Dennis

 

[XL-Dennis]

Hi guys,

I find the following tool that claims to be able to copy XL-files from corrupted floppies:

http://www.exapp.com/support/help.html

I have not tested it myself and I´m not associated with their service they provide.

Kind regards,
Dennis