a password protected OneNote document appears empty

[Urizen]

I have a password protected OneNote document with about 192 Kbytes and when I
open it, it appears empty. I already tried to open a security copy of it made
on July 2007 both with OneNote of Office 2003 and of Office 2007 and it
appears empty in both of them.

I also already opened the document with notepad and it has a lot of
information inside although it is encrypted as the document is password
protected; as so I cannot have access it its content as I have with other
OneNote documents which are not password protected.

The content of the document has highly confidential data and with
extremely high relevance to me. I have no idea why the same problem is also
occurring in the security copy as I have used the file since July until the
last week and I didn't notice any problem with it.

Can someone help me, please? The license I own of Microsoft only covers
software produts, not technical support.


Thank you very much in advance for all the attention given.

Kind regards,
Rui

 

[Urizen]

I have some more news about the recovery process that I have been tried to
perform.

I already tried onenote.exe /forcerepair as well onenote.exe
/forcerepairfull but none of them fixed the problem correctly. I also tried
to fix the file with the Recovery for OneNote utility but it didn't fixed the
file as well. The backup files which are created through OneNote program
appear empty as well even though their backup date is earlier than the date
in which this problem occurred. What can explain such an awkward situation?

With my best regards,
Rui

 

[Ilya Koulchin]

Does OneNote display any error messages? What message do you get when
you unlock the section? Is there an error icon on the notebook? If so,
can you go to File->Sync->Notebook sync status, click the errors tab,
and tell us what errors are being reported?

Ilya

 

[Urizen]

Hello Ilya!

If I double clik the OneNote file a Microsoft Office OneNote dialog box
appears with the following error message: "OneNote has encountered a problem
and cannot complete this operation.". Then I click on the mandatory button
"Ok" and the next procedure is quite similar to opening the section of the
file under consideration. I click in the section and then I enter my
password. After that a message on OneNote pane appears telling "This section
is empty. Click anywhere to create a new page."; and the document has about
192 Kbytes.

The option File->Sync->Notebook sync status doesn't appear available.

What else can I do? Are you a Microsoft expertise?

With my best regards,
Rui Nunes

 

[Ilya Koulchin]

This sounds like the section might have somehow gotten corrupted, so
that OneNote isn't seeing the pages within it. You might be able to
recover some data by having OneNote try to repair it. To do so:
- Open a command prompt window
- Type in '<path to onenote.exe> /forcerepair <path to section>'
(without the single quotes). Typically this would be '"C:\Program
Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\onenote.exe" /forcerepair "C:\documents
and settings\username\my documents\onenote
notebooks\notebook\section.one"', but may vary somewhat based on how
your computer is set up.
If that doesn't work, then I'm not sure what else could be done without
having access to the section itself. Normally I'd recommend opening a
backup copy, but if that's also showing the same problem that's not
going to get us anywhere.

Ilya

 

[Urizen]

Hi Ilya,

Thank you very much for your reply. As I have stated in my second post, I
already tried onenote.exe /forcerepair and onenote.exe /forcerepairfull as
well. The former detected some errors in the file, tried to recover them but
the size of the file changed from 192Kbytes to 40 Kbytes and the recovered
OneNote section appeared empty. The later just notified me with a dialog box
that: "OneNote has encountered a problem and cannot complete this operation.".

I also tried to recover the file content with the Recovery for OneNote
utility found in

http://www.brothersoft.com/business/miscellaneous/recovery_for_onenote_download_46294.html

but, although the signs of the uility had told me that the file could have a
great chance to be recovered, the resultant file become with 4Kbytes and was
empty as well.

What I would really need is that someone from Microsoft try to recover the
content of the document using Microsoft resources. I have already phoned
Microsoft Portugal but they don't care about my situation as the license of
the Office that I am using is from an University Campus. I also had some
problems with Windows Vista Ultimate and because it is a version that come
bundled with the computer that I have bought, they said that they could not
provide me support for that kind of Windows Vista version.

The content of the OneNote file is of the uttermost importance for me and
Microsoft Portugal simply told me to post messages on this newsgroup even
though I had told them that I would pay them what they need to recover the
content of the file.

Is it possible to be more arrogant imbecile than this?

Honestly, such situations only happens at Microsoft, mainly in Portugal, as
the US Microsoft sometimes provides me some support and feedback. Why is
Microsoft Portugal trying to become different than other trademarks that
treat their customers with the value that they really own?


If any more help could be provided from you, I woud appreciate it very much.

Kind regards,
Rui Nunes

 

[Ilya Koulchin]

If you want, you can email me the section. I can take a quick look at
it, but can't promise anything.

Ilya