Yeah, it is an old fax document. However I no longer have the fax software (because let's face it, who faxes anymore?). And I can't find a viewer online, but I may be looking in the wrong place. I did read something about turning it into a tif file so it can be opened with a normal picture viewer, but I couldn't figure out how to do that either.

EMERGENCY! Can anyone help with undeleting files?
 

The one document I use to compile my journal has been corrupted, it would seem, and I can't find a way to recover it. A previous version is current to about the end of last month, but this still means I'm after losing almost two weeks of work!

It appears the file got overwritten somehow, as shown below:

Comment: This file is overwritten with "C:\Windows\SERVIC~2\NetworkService\AppData\Local\ Microsoft\Media Player\Art Cache\LocalMLS\{1CCE9F31-32B3-4BA3-BF43-384189807D8E}.jpg"

If anyone can help me recover the file I would be eternally grateful. It's originally an Open Office (ODT) word processor file.

This is NOT a good start to my week! :mad: :banghead:

Shoot Trollheart, that stinks. I hope someone knows how to help...

Did you try Googling that message? Seems odd that a file could be overwritten by another unless there was some file system error. Are you having any other file system weirdness?

I tried. It's too specific, and if I take out the path and leave it more generic I just get information on how to overwrite a jpg with another jpg.

Just one of these fecking file corruption things I guess: they sometimes happen. Just typical that of all the files it should happen with, it would have to be this one!

Luckily I haven't been too active writing over the last week or so, with the result that I think I may have lost only four or five reviews, so it could have been worse. At least I have a backup, even if it doesn't come right up to date.

Bloody annoying though: guess I'll have to be more careful of backing up in future. You'd think after thirty-odd years with a computer I'd have learned that by now!
:banghead:

Not that I can really help here, but why is this in suggestions and feedback?

Because I didn't know where else to put it, and was looking for suggestions that might help me sort the problem.

One. More. Time! :banghead:

If the file was overwritten, you will never be able to recover it. Not even the Department of Defense can recover the original file once overwritten. (Which is, incidentally, the reason there's a DoD standard for security-wiping hard-drives that involves multiple overwrites to remove data)
If the file was simply deleted, and no new data was written to the same clusters on the hard-drive, then it is easily recoverable. There are a lot of paid programs or services you can use to do this reliably, assuming the space where the original data resided on the hard-drive was not overwritten with new data (which is very likely, considering that when you "delete" something, it is not actually erased, but simply tagged as "overwritable" in a sense, whereupon new data is free to be stored in that area, if you're unlucky)

So, if you're sure the data has been overwritten, it's lost.
If you think it may have only been deleted, then you have a chance.
9 times out of 10, a corrupted file means a portion of it has been overwritten for whatever reason, so that portion can never be recovered, thus rendering the file as a whole, irrecoverable. Short answer.

Also, Trollheart, your thread has been merged into the Computer Tech Support Thread.
A re-direct has been left in the original forum for a week, for convenience, should you not see this.

Thx Dali. I did look but could find no appropriate place to put this.

As you can see from the message quoted, the file does appear to have been overwritten by some jpg lodged in Media Player, so I think I'm stuffed. Guess I'll just have to try to remember all the good parts about what I had written, and try to recreate them.

Thanks anyway,
TH

oh, i think i should post my question here instead of the other thread.

i need some people to review/test a vpn.

we'll give free vpn access for a year.

who's interested?

Anyone use Livedrive online backup or some other remote backup subscription? I need probably upwards of 2TB remote storage just wondering if anyone has a solution they're happy with?

I used Livedrive, had a year subscription but couldn't afford to renew it. Found it really slowed down my PC though, constantly uploading and it took a hell of a long time to get all my stuff up there. Mind you, there was about 500 gigs of it...

Haven't tried any others. Only problem is, after going to all that trouble (and time) to get your files online, it's a tough choice to then have to abandon them if you can't renew the sub each year. I'm not convinced it's any better than splurging on a whole slew of DVD discs, or indeed a new external drive, and just loading on that/them.

Yeah I do backups to external drives but it would be nice to have my photos and music backed up off-site in case of fire or theft.

That's a lot of music and pics (I think I have a ton of music @ ~350gb).

I have a lot of digital videos too which get pretty big.

Oh, yea, videos completely mess up the estimations.

OK this is a question for anyone who has experience with DOS emulators:

I just downloaded DOSBox and am trying to run games on it but can't for the life of me figure out how to get it work. I've tried running it un-extracted on DOSBox, which gave me an 'illegal command' message, and I tried extracting it and then running the application, where I get an error message telling me the application is not compatible with my version of Windows.

Can anyone walk me through the steps?

I'm getting the games from this site by the way:
Best Old Games | Old Games : Free download [eng]

What version of Windows are you running? I've been having similar problems with DOS Box... Windows 7 64 bit, with Service Pack 1 here.

Exactly the same. :beer:

Hopefully someone can sort this out.

Can you get the properties on the exe and choose to run it in compatibility mode with an older version of Windows? Sometimes that works on older emus.

I tried setting them to Windows 95, the earliest compatibility mode. No luck, but it was a good suggestion thanks.

Holy crap this turned out longer than I expected but DOS isn't exactly the most intuitive thing out there. It's not super complicated once you get used to it though. Let me know if this helps or if you're still having issues either with the app or with specific games. :thumb:

----- and here we go -----

The thing with DOS games and applications is that you still need to use the old command line prompts and enter the actual commands yourself, there's no double clicking the .exe and voila! action.

First you need to extract all the old games into a main parent folder on your system. As an example all my old games go into a folder called 'Abandonware' on my F: drive (with about 50 classics in there)

Next you need to run DOSBox and mount that folder as a virtual drive. The easiest way to do that is by using the following command (just launch DOSBox and type it in)

mount F F:\Abandonware

What that's actually doing is calling the command 'mount' then specifying the virtual drive letter, then specifying the folder you want to associate to the virtual drive. So in your case, change the first F to whatever single letter you prefer then specify the folder where you extracted all your older games into.

If you did it correctly DOSBox will display a message stating "Drive specific letter is mounted as local directory Hard drive letter:\Folder with all your extracted games

Then you need to use old school DOS commands, the main ones you'll be using are:
X:
dir
cd

Replace the X in that first one to the drive letter you specify in the Mount command line. So using my example I'd just type F: and it will change from the default Z:\> to F:\> line to indicate that the current drive has been changed.

Dir as is will present a list of all the contents within the folder. dir /p will parse the information by page in case you have more folders than can be displayed on a single screen's worth of space. Another handy command option for finding files within specific game folders is dir *.exe which will only display executable files, you can also replace that with *.txt to only see text files, etc.

cd stands for Change Directory so once you've changed your folder to point to your games, you'll also need the specific spelling as seen by using the 'dir' command since longer file / folder names get truncated by DOS. So you'll end up with stuff like cd STARWA~1 as the command to change the directory to that specific game folder. cd .. moves you back one step in the directory structure.

Once you're in the game folder you're looking to play you'll then need to run the 'dir' command again to find out the specific name of the file needed to launch the game. Normally it's just the name of the gamename.exe, other times it might be a batch file (gamename.bat) or something like main.exe or launch.exe

Also depending on the game you're trying to play it might require specific hardware that isn't necessarily supported or present (like flight sticks). I've noticed that a lot of games that came out during the final transition from DOS to Windows in the mid 90s are the most problematic too. If you're still having hassles, specify the game and I'll download it and give you a specific list of commands to get it working if possible.

Awesome instructions, it worked perfectly. Sucks this forum doesn't have a 'like' feature for this post. Gonna bookmark it for future use too, thanks.

One last question, is there anyway to enlarge or maximize the DOSBox screen? As it stands, it's pretty small and the maximize option is grayed out.

Good to know this works, I will try it. Thanks Dave!

No way to maximize the window as far as I know... if you find a way to make it larger let me know, lol!

What kind of startup menu do you see? Whenever I play around in a virtual machine I can usually make the screen bigger by adding vga=773 to the kernel command line.

Glad to know it worked :beer:

As for maximizing the size... Alt+Enter (default Windows keyboard command to maximize a window) 'works' but there's no easy way to make it look right on a widescreen monitor since most of those old DOS games are locked to specific resolutions with 4:3 aspect ratios. Get used to everyone looking a little shorter and wider than normal, OR big old 17" 'square' monitors sell for like $10 on places like kijiji or craig's list.

However if you've got a Radeon type video card you might need to tweak your scaling options or you'll just end up with massive black bars around the edge of the window. If that's the case launch your AMD VISION Engine Control Center (should be in your start menu) then open the Digital Flat-Panels tab on the left, then click on Scaling Options, then check the box for 'Enable GPU Scaling' within the Image Scaling panel on the right hand side of the window.

What classics are you guys enjoying?

I just downloaded Sid Meier's Pirates! and SimCity 2000. :thumb:

Never played Pirates, but I used to play SimCity a ton, so it should be interesting revisiting it. I'll probably get around to all the other old classics in due time, and I'm open to recommendations if you have any.

Earlier today, I was using my laptop, which had around 11GB of free space left. I decided to download a game demo on Steam, and it tells me that I now have around 50GB of space left. I never uninstalled any games (which use up a lot of my HD's memory) today, so I'm very concerned. Can anyone help me with this problem?

You probably emptied your recycle bin at some point.

If you restarted your computer it's possible that most of that was used in cache files that were cleared when you restarted. Especially if software crashes it doesn't get time to clean up any temp files it created.

If I send something to my recycle bin, I delete it immediately, so that's not the problem.

Firefox actually crashed a couple of times today, and I did restart my computer some time before I noticed the extra space, but I highly doubt that Firefox's cache being deleted caused it since I clear it every week.

Did you perhaps empty recycle bin or change any partitions?

minor problem with my laptop and it's beginning to piss me off. When I'm typing the it's like it jumps back into the middle of my sentence and I don't normally realise til I've already typed it all out. Major pain in the ass but if nobody can help me it's fine. Also goes back a web page when I press delete.

Would you be accidently tapping on the touch pad when you type? If you have a plug in mouse you can turn off the touch pad if that's the problem.


Delete or Backspace? I think it's normal for the backspace to go back, although if you're on a laptop you might only have the one key. Might be able to change it in your browser settings somewhere.

I don't think it's to do with the touchpad, I have a fairly large laptop so the touchpad can sit between my wrists when I'm typing and not get accidentally hit. I also do not have a plug in mouse :(.

I don't know the difference, it's the delete button above the enter button that causes it to do this...

stp is right, it's your touchpad. My guess is there's a part of your palm that's resting on it. It use to happen to me on my old Compaq all the time, the best solution I found was to turn off the touchpad while I was typing. I was fortunate though because there was a button right above it that let me do it so it wasn't time consuming.

Probably the touchpad, or you could have the PAUSE/BREAK button pushed accidentally. Not 100% sure what it's there for, but it has mucked up many of my typing escapades by re-positioning the text selector on the page before.

Ipod problem
 

By any chance would any of you know how to delete files from an ipod, preferably WITHOUT having to install bloody itunes? I'm using MediaMonkey, but the ipod is now full, and unlike my lovely Zen X-Fi, which you can use as a simple USB drive, drag-and-drop etc, ipods make the process ridiculously complicated it would seem. I want to remove some files so as to make room for other, newer ones. Simple? As Anne Robinson says on "Watchdog": think again!

I'd really appreciate any help guys.
Thanks
Trollheart

Precisely why I've never used iAnything. They lock you into how they want you to do things. Being raised a DOS kid, I need the flexibility of having complete access to files and folders. Directory structuring has always been a staple in my work, for programming purposes, jobs, and even my own personal files. So with that said, the only way I've seen to get around the iTunes install, is to DL/Install something else as in:

CopyTrans Manager - CNET Download.com

Which will act as iTunes, but without all the bloated overhead, and I only found that out by doing a bit of searching, so I haven't tried/tested it but it does come from a relatively trusted source:

How to Delete Songs From an iPod Without iTunes | eHow.com

Sorry I can't be of more help. If it aint a CAD app, Lisp, VBA, .NET or a guitar, I'm at a loss.