Lost Excel File

[Polyprod]

After a power cut one of our machines which had an Excel spreadsheet open
would not restart.
Windows would not run but I have been able to put the hard drive in another
machine as a second drive and access the files on it.
My problem is that the spreadsheet that was open has disapeared.
I have tried a couple of free file recovery progs and have found a TMP file
in the directory that the original was in.
I am guessing that if I could start Office from the crashed drive then it
would trigger the "recovered file" procedure.
If I rename the TMP file to XLS then it will open but most it looks garbage.
Is there another way to open one of these files?
Please help.

Many Thanks,

Kevan

 

[JLatham]

I don't have much other than bad news for you. I'm thinking that the power
outage came at a very bad point - probably while the .xls file was being
written to the drive. In any event it came while the file was open and
Excel/Windows had no opportunity to close it and update the directory entry.
The .tmp file is probably all you have of it now and I think that any attempt
to open it is just going to show you what you have already seen.

If you cannot see all of the folders/files on the crashed disk, here's
something you can try to do to recover data from that crashed disk, and it
might get your data back: go to http://www.knoppix.org/ and download a copy
of Knoppix and create a bootable CD from the download (that's all done pretty
automatically). Set your system to boot from CD and boot from the Knoppix
CD. Eventually you'll be presented with a Windows-like desktop and will be
able to browse all drives on the system, search for files and copy them for
data retrieval. One thing to note: initially Knoppix has all drives set to
read-only, so you'll have to set one up to be able to write with (using
equivalent of right-click .. properties). When i have to do this kind of
thing for data recovery, I usually attach a large (16GB) USB thumb drive to
the system to copy the recovered files to. It's a little slow but reduces
risk of Knoppix altering directory structure of another hard drive -
something they warn of the possibility of. It's never messed up the thumb
drive, but you never know.

I hope someone comes along and offers a better solution to you.

Before going I'll make 2 recommendations that I think will help in future
situations like this:
#1 - invest in some Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) units for your
business machines. They will keep your systems powered up during even a
total power failure long enough to gracefully close programs and shut the
systems down, helping to prevent data loss. They will also help you ride
right through transient brownouts - those 'light-blinking' mini-power drops
without data loss. APC (American Power Conversion), Belkin and Tripp Lite
all make good ones.

#2 - develop and implement a good backup strategy to help protect your
critical business (and home) files. Then in a situation like this, while you
may lose recent work done in a file, at least a backup copy is available to
give you a good start at rebuilding the file to the state it was in when it
was destroyed.