Bug 34168

Created attachment 43239 [details]
Probably a copy of the corrupted .xls file

I don't know what caused the problem, however I had some vi(m) files that were corrupted when I had a usb thumbdrive plugged in, and the file manager for it ate all the ram and froze the system. I got a new hard drive, which I'm using in conjunction with the old one. The .xls files that I'm having trouble with, were on the first drive, and may have been open when it lost ram.

The problem now is that at least those two and perhaps other files are corrupted or at least have red 'artifacts' -extra letters- which should not be there. 

You can see how this looks at: http://yfrog.com/mkartifactsp

It takes on the order of an hour for one of these files to open. 

I have replaced OpenOffice twice and gotten LibreOffice. The files still have the artifacts. 

It's not all my spreadsheets, just these two, and copies of them. Others seem fine, but I don't know if all of them are, I have a lot.

I'm having a secondary problem now with LibreOffice not recovering. I closed it by accident, and now using the gui to open LibreOffice it opens the File Recovery window but isn't opening.

The first time, I got an error, 'unknown file type' .. now it's just gray and not moving to the second step.

I have three files in it:
2010-12-28skypeaccesslist.xls (corrupt)
2011-02-07uncorruptingskypeaccesslist.xls - i pasted the contents from the other file to vi(m) and then to the spreadsheet, which removed the artifacts.

2011-01-25sypeaccesslist.xls - I don't know if this is the same, and a copy of the bad file, or not. 

$ls -l *sky*
-rw-r--r-- 1 llhull llhull  85504 2011-01-17 17:18 2010-12-28skypeaccesslist.xls
-rw-r--r-- 1 llhull llhull   5640 2011-02-06 00:50 2011-02-06uncorruptingskypeaccesslist2010-12-28.txt 
-rw-r--r-- 1 llhull llhull  85504 2011-01-25 00:47 2011-01-25skypeaccesslist.xls

Any help you can give, I will appreciate very much!

chalcedony

This might not be a copy of the corrupted file, i couldn't get the other one to attach.