🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <49ns7g$18ha@flood.weeg.uiowa.edu>, haferman@icaen.uiowa.edu
(Jeff Haferman) wrote:

|I've got a problem Microsoft Word 5.1 file, but I don't know if
|the problem is Word, my hard disk, or the system.  I can open
|the file fine, it looks just fine, and I can print it off and
|it looks fine.  The problem is, I can't copy it or make changes
|to it.
|
|If I try to "save as" from within Word, I get an "Unrecoverable
|disk error on file: <filename>". [snip]
|
|Word will allow me to "save as" the original file as text only,
|but not into RTF, Word for Windows, or any other formatted
|file.  
|
|I have run Disk First Aid and Norton Utilities on my Hard Drive,
|and they have not found any problems.  I have rebuilt the desktop.
|I have increased the memory to Word.  I have turned all extensions
|off.  Nothing has worked.
|
|I tried converting the file to a BinHex file, but I get a
|system error of -36 (IO error).

The file is dead. Is your hard drive full? Usually this only 
occurs on full floppies (had this just last week actually - 
I recovered the file by using BBEdit to snaffle the text out,
zapping the odd characters, and trimming the header and footer
gunk, and giving the plain text back... this is the usual way
of recovering truly dead files - and fast save stops this 
process by not having any quantity of in-order text to recover).

Steps to recover your document -

if you can still open it, copy it out in SimpleText sized 
documents, and save these fragments in text format using
SimpleText. Your file has no apparent length to the System,
and it's only because Word circumvents the file manager 
that it can open what you have there anyway. Trash the file.
It's dead.

Visit the Tools menu, choose "Preferences" and click on 
Open and Save. Make sure the check box called "Fast Save"
is turned off, and every time you re-install your system
or re-install Word, make sure this box is off. Fast Save
is a Very Bad Thing�, and must be turned off for document
safety. Fast Save means Slow Open, Slow Printing, Slow 
Print Previewing, Slow Spell Checks, unrecoverable documents
if something like this happens, and one to two seconds of
saving times to hard drives, and maybe 5-10 seconds to
floppies. In other words, a very bad "feature" which I take
all steps I can to stamp out.

Create your new document, and import all these new little
fragments. Make a backup. Do backups regularly.

Good luck!

-- 
"Being digital, whatever it means,
  means having it your way." - Nicholas Negroponte

Andrew van der Stock, Systems Administrator
Computing Services Group, RMIT Business Faculty
see http://www.bf.rmit.edu.au/~ajv for contact details