Lost my Life Story in Appleworks-HELP PLEASE!

[cheeryble]

iBook G3 900/256 combo MacOSX 10.4.4

PLEASE HELP!
I can't quite believe this on top of having my combo drive go down, and my adapter fizzle out.

Last night I was continuing to write my life story in Appleworks, when I got the "spinning pizza" cursor. It didn't go away for a long time so I had to Force Shut Down.
When I reopened and went to open the file it said something like
"file damaged, cannot open"

Is it retrievable??

Why didn't I back it up?
Because my combo drive is knackered, although it's been very little used in 2 and a bit years, same as the charger was rarely taken out.

While I'm here, does anyone think I can claim for a new iBook?
In under two and a half years I've had two logic board replacements with two months downtime as I'm in Thailand and things run slower, my combo drive is now down as is my charger.

thanx so much for any help you can give,
John

[adambyte]

As for your AppleWorks document... it sounds like you're one of those people who makes one big huge file for things. If you were writing your life story into one big huge document, that's a problem, because the bigger a file is, the more likely it is to get corrupted. In the future, to avoid this problem, I suggest breaking things up into "chapters"... one document for each...

However... as to solve your current problem... You could try using Apple's Pages app, part of the iWork suite, to open it... than might work... you could also try using the TextEdit applications... as a last resort (and I know this works, because my mom had this exact same situation).... use BBEdit to open the file... It won't have any of the fancy formatting or anything, but you'll be glad to be able to see your life story in plain text after other solutions have failed.

Hope this helps.

[cheeryble]

Originally Posted by adambyte

You could try using Apple's Pages app, part of the iWork suite, to open it... than might work... you could also try using the TextEdit applications... as a last resort (and I know this works, because my mom had this exact same situation).... use BBEdit to open the file... It won't have any of the fancy formatting or anything, but you'll be glad to be able to see your life story in plain text after other solutions have failed.

Hope this helps.

Thankyou for the advice Adam...

I don't have iWork, and without wishing to appear thick, I can't find BBEdit in TextEdit or anywhere else for that matter.
I couldn't give a toss about whether I lose any formatting, so if you can point me to BBEdit and how to use it to open my file that would be great.
I'll try looking on the net at the same time. Thanx again
John

[bobw]

You can get a free cersion of BBEdit Here

TextEdit is installed with the system and should be in your Applications folder.

You could also try opening the file on another Mac, or in Appleworks in OS 9 and see if it will open.

Also, try locking the file, then try opening it. It may tell you it's locked and ask if you would like to open a copy.

[cheeryble]

Thanx for your help too Bob,
I got it quite easily:

Textedit>Services>textedit>Open selected file

and it opened a certain amount of gobbledegook followed by the text followed by a mass of gobbledegook. Picked the text out, copied and pasted and I'm a happy bunny.
I must say Appleworks has proved tiself a bit dodgy, i sometimes have the cursor moving off it's proper spot, and spinning pizzas. Perhaps it should be call Apple-doesn't-works. Think I'll dump it.
Thanx again.

[andychrist]

John/cheeryble, if you are trying to run Tiger on only 256 MB RAM, it is no wonder you are getting the spinning cursor all the time. Get more RAM and in the mean time, disable any open Dashboard Widgets. They eat up memory!

[fryke]

And for writing: Use TextEdit. It handles RTF-files beautifully, is free, comes with every Mac plus RTF files can be opened by basically _any_ word processing application. Even WordPad on Windows. You still get a couple of styling features with the format. Just for writing, TextEdit is _my_ favourite application since 1998 or 1999. And I did write a couple of books with it.

[cheeryble]

Thankyou Fryke...yes i'll stick with Textedit.

Andychrist....yes I'm aware 256 is not great but i'm loathe to spend more money on my iBook....I just had the combo drive won't work and now the charger adapter is kaput. Despite careful use.
This on top of two logic board replacements!
It's two years four months old...I'm thinking of asking for free replacement for my troubles.....d'you think I have any chances?