Okies so long story short, my computer froze the other day and I had to manually turn it off while I had one of my documents open. When I restarted it, I never got the 'recover document' pop up that I usually get and now the file won't open at all.

I get this error message:

Document in Use

Document file 'Fang's Master' is locked for editing by;

Unknown user

Open document read-only or open a copy of the document for editing.

Then it gives me the buttons to push for these options, but I've tried both of them and they just freeze up at about 75% open and I have to manually restart my computer again. I had assumed at first that this was my crappy computer, however, this is the only file it does it on. I can open, edit, save all other documents in Open Office with no problem, it's just this one file which I of course did not have saved on my USB card.

Does anyone know how to get around this problem or perhaps how to manually prompt for a recovery of this file; instead of the entire computer. Any help is greatly appreciated .

Hairann

Here ya go...

http://user.services.openoffice.org/en/forum/viewtopic.php?f=30&t=40683
- and -
http://user.services.openoffice.org/en/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=36597


Unfortunately it seems that error is one of the major ones, and if you can't fix it with the lock file, or looking for the sgmlf.tmp directory. This is also gonna be somewhat dependent on the version of OpenOffice.

If you can ever get a single one open at a time, whether recover or not, save the thing into a new file... and get rid of the old one.

Now, you may, I stress this a lot, may be able to open the .odt file with something like WinZip, WinRAR, etc... Take out a copy of the content.xml. That should have the text from the previous full save, going around the lock file for editing... Well, at least the XML for the text. :/

You'll have to clean the stupid thing out if you want plain text as there's the wonderful tags like:


So, yeah... It'll basically be one long line of the above.

-J

Okies you lost me at 'here you go' lol, but thank you so much. I will have my husband follow your directions when he gets home, since he knows more about computer stuff than I do and I would just make things worse by trying hehe. Thank you again and I will let you know how it turns out .

And Karma for you.

Yeah opening it with Winrar worked which is really good since my hubby was confused as well. And he's the one that's supposed to know about computers hehe. Thanks again and an extra karma for your suggestion working .