ODF recovery from Flash

[buster80]

Got an upset student, the document she needs is on a flash drive.

Got everything off it and 90% opens including images.

The main thing she needs has been done in open office (ODF) However it is blank on Openoffice and Word.

Ran Kernel for ODF on it but no go, the hex for the file is fairly chunky tho. The file itself is 223kb

any ideas?

thanks

andy

[Vulcan]

any ideas?

What was the problem diagnosed with the USB stick - logical (filesystem) corruption only or unreadable blocks or ...? Any possibility of earlier versions of the file on a PC anywhere, where the doc was prevously edited? Consider raw text extraction if the file format is too corrupted for it to be recognised natively? Look in the USB stick free space for earlier copies?

[drc]

OpenOffice typically saves raw text in a zipped xml format, so the raw text will not be visible in hex viewer etc

However if you can locate and carve the relevant zipped xml (content.xml) data then you can rebuild a .zip file for it and extract the text

[Vulcan]

OpenOffice typically saves raw text in a zipped xml format, so the raw text will not be visible in hex viewer etc

Good point - it was the OP's mention of Word that got me into typical "Word" mindset... The OP hasn't said what file format was actually used - was it really an odt? We haven't been told. It would be nice if the OP showed some of the hex dump they were looking at, IMHO.

[drc]

I was just going off of this

The main thing she needs has been done in open office (ODF)

[Vulcan]

@drc:

I was just going off of this

The main thing she needs has been done in open office (ODF)

Sure, understood. I just know several people who use OpenOffice at home, saving into normal Word .doc files, so that they can read the same file on systems running MS Word at the office / university etc. - hence why I took the OP's mention of Word in that way.

[buster80]

thanks guys, its a head scratcher