(old)Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

Hi Guys, has anyone had instances of creating files in puppy (Grafpup in my case) and finding that they have been trashed after you opened them in windoze? A couple of weeks ago, I lost a odt file that I accidently opened in windows. Instead of telling me it didnt recognise the format, it seems it attempted to open it and destroyed it in the process.
This time, I had just spent all day working on my very first website. Got it to a point that I was happy enough to send to a friend who is organising the hosting. As he uses windoze, I went into windows to zip the folder as it had photos etc which added up to several mb. I zipped it and emailed it. Then I thought I would try viewing the originals in internet explorer to see how it rendered. I was horrified to find that all 7 pages of html had either reverted to what had been saved yesterday, or been entirely trashed, so all of my todays work had vanished I keep getting this strange feeling that today didnt really exist and that I must have dreamed it all. Back into Grafpup and the damage to the original directory is horrendous, with pages missing large bits or just full of junk. Fortunately, when I opened up the zip file, it was not so bad, just reverted to what I had done yesterday.
I was tempted to completely wipe the XP partition, but went for a walk in the rain instead.
Has this sort of thing happened to anyone else?
Mike

msumner wrote:I was tempted to completely wipe the XP partition, but went for a walk in the rain instead.

Wrong choice ...

-aj

alienjeff wrote:

msumner wrote:I was tempted to completely wipe the XP partition, but went for a walk in the rain instead.

Wrong choice ...

-aj

Walkin in the rain can be refreshing.

I have opened odt and ods files created in Windows with OOo, edited in Puppy with OOo and edited again in Windows.
I haven't had a problem except with some some formatting issues.

In my case the OOo files were on media which I can connect as well in Windows as in Puppy, s in fact I opened always the original file.

Just out of curiosity, is the format of the partition where the file is stored NTFS or FAT32? And did your friend receive the files damaged, or as you meant to send them?

In my case it was FAT32
I still avoid mixing NTFS with Linux, altho it should work.

Hi Flash, I have taken to storing all my working files on a fat32 "data drive" . I havn't heard from my friend yet, but I suspect the zip folder he got will be the same as the zip folder I rescued the less trashed files from. So the stuff in the zip basically reverted to what had been saved the day before(ish), and the original directory was similar but with some html pages turned to gobbledegook.

Be-em, I have only just started saving in odt so I am not used to the idea that I can't open them with Word, hence the mistake of accidently trying. I havnt installed open office to windows as I now only use windows when I'm forced.
Edti - I should have mentioned in the first post I was trying to open the odt file with word
AJ. I think you were right. By the way, it is still raining and my partner just had to take my truck to work cos our lane is under 2 feet of water
Guess I'm stuck here for the day.....
Cheers, Mike

Mike ,
Sorry to here about your loss and trust that you are well above the flood.

Puppy contains zip and unzip and Xarchive supports the zip format so you shouldn't need to use windows.

I find it especially odd that IE trashed the files when it should really just be read-only. I presume it gave one of those useless security warnings about accessing the local filesystem (obviously you would say yes) but you'd at least think it would warn you before writing to the file.

msumner,
As far as I know, Word can't open a ODT format, unless the very newest version has support for it now.

What I do is save in OOo the doc as ODT, but as DOC as well.
I send the DOC to people who have to work with it.

If someone doesn't have to work with a document I export in OOo to pdf and sent that one.

Hope this helps.

Hi Will, The flood subsided as fast as it appeared so I think something got unplugged downstream, thanks.
I don't think it would have been IE that did the damage, I can only imagine that it was the windoze zip process because the contents of the zip were altered. I didn't realize that linux zip is compatible with windows, definately worth knowing.

Béèm wrote:msumner,
As far as I know, Word can't open a ODT format, unless the very newest version has support for it now.

What I do is save in OOo the doc as ODT, but as DOC as well.
I send the DOC to people who have to work with it.

If someone doesn't have to work with a document I export in OOo to pdf and sent that one.

Hope this helps.

Thanks Be-em, what you suggest is actually what I was intending to do. I had actually saved as both file types but forgot and opened the wrong one . You would expect Word to just tell you "sorry, I have no idea what this is" rather than mangling it. Fortunately, in that case, I still had the .doc copy. I have only recently started using Writer and think it is a massive improvement over Word. I never did get on with Word, it always seemed to want to put pictures where I didn't want them, among other irritations. I just wish I had found linux (read that as puppy) earlier.

Cheers , Mike

Might not be windows; may be a hardware glitch. Maybe your hard drive is failing, or you had a lightning strike nearby!

Whenever I have put a lot of work into something I get paranoid and save it somewhere, maybe a flash drive, before doing anything else with it. Paranoid can be a good thing.

Might not be windows; may be a hardware glitch

a corrupted file system (usually can be fixed with scandisk or chkdsk) can do that too

I wanted to chime in on this one, because I have had a very similar situation a few weeks ago with Puppy. I was working a a document in Abiword and saved it as a .doc to my USB flash drive. I shut down Puppy and went to XP to print and the file was unreadable. I have done this countless times with versions prior to 2.16. It happened again later with an rtf file as well. I dismissed it since I had remastered my version of Puppy 2.16 that I was using, but maybe it is more of a bug. I will try to reproduce it tonight and report my results.

Rhino

GuestToo wrote: a corrupted file system (usually can be fixed with scandisk or chkdsk) can do that too

Sounds reasonable but how does that happen? I'm pretty sure I did have to run chkdsk after the .odt episode. Seem to remember opening the trashed file caused a hang. Its a bit hazy now as it was a couple of weeks ago.
Mike

msumner wrote:

Béèm wrote:msumner,
As far as I know, Word can't open a ODT format, unless the very newest version has support for it now.

What I do is save in OOo the doc as ODT, but as DOC as well.
I send the DOC to people who have to work with it.

If someone doesn't have to work with a document I export in OOo to pdf and sent that one.

Hope this helps.

Thanks Be-em, what you suggest is actually what I was intending to do. I had actually saved as both file types but forgot and opened the wrong one . You would expect Word to just tell you "sorry, I have no idea what this is" rather than mangling it. Fortunately, in that case, I still had the .doc copy. I have only recently started using Writer and think it is a massive improvement over Word. I never did get on with Word, it always seemed to want to put pictures where I didn't want them, among other irritations. I just wish I had found linux (read that as puppy) earlier.

Cheers , Mike

It is because that 'strange' picture behavior in Word that I went to OOo.

Bernard

if you are using Puppy 216 with a pup_save file, Puppy does not seem to cleanly unmount the pup_save or the partition that the pup_save file is on ... see: http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=17987

if you modify files on the partition that the pup_save file is on, /mnt/home, and if the partition is not unmounted cleanly, this can cause the file system to be corrupted ... usually scandisk or chkdsk can repair the damage (usually just blocks or clusters that were not properly deallocated)

i think that this is a bug that should be fixed ... i have tried a few things, but i'm not sure what is causing the problem, or what is different between 214 and 216

this bug may have nothing to do with your problem ... in any case, the most likely cause of file system corruption would probably be shutting down without properly unmounting the file systems, for example, because of a system crash, or simply turning off the machine while the operating system is still running

GuestToo wrote:if you are using Puppy 216 with a pup_save file, Puppy does not seem to cleanly unmount the pup_save or the partition that the pup_save file is on ... see: http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=17987

if you modify files on the partition that the pup_save file is on, /mnt/home, and if the partition is not unmounted cleanly, this can cause the file system to be corrupted ... usually scandisk or chkdsk can repair the damage (usually just blocks or clusters that were not properly deallocated)

i think that this is a bug that should be fixed ... i have tried a few things, but i'm not sure what is causing the problem, or what is different between 214 and 216

this bug may have nothing to do with your problem ... in any case, the most likely cause of file system corruption would probably be shutting down without properly unmounting the file systems, for example, because of a system crash, or simply turning off the machine while the operating system is still running

I was actually running Grafpup 2 .00 but this seems to have the same problem of not cleanly unmounting. I was checking out the competition in the form of ubuntu studio a couple of weeks ago and that made a big deal during the install process about both puppy and grafpup partitions not being cleanly unmounted.

As for crashing the system, I may have accidently closed the laptop lid at some point and that crashes the system. I have mentioned this on several occasions on the forum but no-one has ever shown any interest. It is bad if closing the lid causes a crash, and not something laptop users should be expected to put up with. I really hope that this will be fixed for 2.17 and hopefully for the next release of grafpup.
Cheers, Mike