Total System Loss

[dr_mabeuse]

I have a Dell computer, 14 months old. I was browsing the hangout last Thursday, and suddenly without warning up popped the Blue Screen of Death: "shutting down to protect the system". At the bottom of the screen it said something about performing a system dump, and some number was scrolling fast. I shut it down, but it was too late. The hard drive was gone, everything I had was lost. Fourteen months of writing, two novellas, all my settings, bookmarks, pictures, everything. Gone.

I tried to reload windows to see if anything could be saved, but the drive was fried. Dell was very nice about it. After going through their support desk in India for three hours, they had someone come out the next day and change the hard drive, but of course, by that time the damage was done and I was totally fucked. My last backup was done in February, and now it looks like that CD didn’t burn right. Although I’d checked it after I’d made it, I can’t open it now, so I’ve got nothing left.

All I’ve got now is the stuff I’ve already published, and that’s what my question’s about.

I’ve been working on a serialized novel, and publishing the chapters on Lit. I now want to copy and paste the stories from Lit back into Word, but I can’t remember how to do it. I know I have to use “Paste Special”, but then I don’t know what option to choose.

Any advice was be greatly appreciated.

And for God’s sake back up your stuff now. This was a perfectly good computer, with no signs of trouble aside from the occasional pop-up. You have no idea how pissy and depressing this is, and the loss is only hitting me now.

---dr.M.

 

[pop_54]

That's shit zoot... I fucking hate puters when they do that sort of thing... Could it have been a Virus?? Was there no drive left at all to run a file recovery scan?? When I get the blue screen and things appear to be happening still... I just crash the whole thing with the power off button and try to recover later in safe start.

Not too sure about your copy paste thing other than can't you highlight the lot off the lit page and do a straight copy / paste into word, then square and tidy it all up later in word.

 

[Lisa Denton]

I have a Dell computer, 14 months old. I was browsing the hangout last Thursday, and suddenly without warning up popped the Blue Screen of Death: "shutting down to protect the system". At the bottom of the screen it said something about performing a system dump, and some number was scrolling fast. I shut it down, but it was too late. The hard drive was gone, everything I had was lost. Fourteen months of writing, two novellas, all my settings, bookmarks, pictures, everything. Gone.

I tried to reload windows to see if anything could be saved, but the drive was fried. Dell was very nice about it. After going through their support desk in India for three hours, they had someone come out the next day and change the hard drive, but of course, by that time the damage was done and I was totally fucked. My last backup was done in February, and now it looks like that CD didn’t burn right. Although I’d checked it after I’d made it, I can’t open it now, so I’ve got nothing left.

All I’ve got now is the stuff I’ve already published, and that’s what my question’s about.

I’ve been working on a serialized novel, and publishing the chapters on Lit. I now want to copy and paste the stories from Lit back into Word, but I can’t remember how to do it. I know I have to use “Paste Special”, but then I don’t know what option to choose.

Any advice was be greatly appreciated.

And for God’s sake back up your stuff now. This was a perfectly good computer, with no signs of trouble aside from the occasional pop-up. You have no idea how pissy and depressing this is, and the loss is only hitting me now.

---dr.M.

I dunno, I just took part of you post and did a copy and regular paste into word. Once its there you can select all and change fonts or anything else you want.

You can pick up a used piece of junk computer for next to nothing, slap network cards into both and run a secure wired cable and an old router, also cheap, between the two. Thats what I got. You just shove everything into shared files and occasionally copy files from shared into regular documents on your spare.

Its a backup to your backups. I burn cd backups about once a month but I shuffle files around and keep anything important on files in both computers almost daily cause its so fucking easy.

 

[Guest]

Why did the chicken cross the road?

The traffic light was red, but the chicken was bored!

 

[R. Richard]

"I tried to reload windows to see if anything could be saved, but the drive was fried. Dell was very nice about it. After going through their support desk in India for three hours, they had someone come out the next day and change the hard drive, but of course, by that time the damage was done and I was totally fucked. My last backup was done in February, and now it looks like that CD didn’t burn right. Although I’d checked it after I’d made it, I can’t open it now, so I’ve got nothing left."

There are people who make a living recovering data from 'fried' hard drives. They can recover information from unbelievable situations. If you still have the 'fried' drive, I would suggest that you contact one of the recovery people/services.

You can find such services by searching the Internet. You can also find that kind of information by chatting up a techie at one of the places in your town that actually repairs computers (I am not talking sales shops).

Good luck.

 

[CharleyH]

Try "Unformatted text" option

 

[doormouse]

Shit, that so sucks dr. I'm really sorry to hear you lost everything.

I had my PC crash twice last year, so I naturally put everything on disk. It's habit now.

I lost my kids pics... first day at school pics... they hurt the most.

I know your pain, but still... I'd be lost if half the stuff I have on my PC now was lost.

Thanks for the wake up call. Going to copy to disk. My stories, for what they're worth already are, but it's pics that I don't want to lose.

Did you send your stories to anyone? Maybe they still have copies. Even in archives. I hope you can recover some of your lost work hon.

 

[doormouse]

If you still have the old hard drive, talk to Tolyk.

He might know how to save or recover your stuff.

 

[hiddenself]

Take it to the professionals

What R. Richard said.
You'd be amazed what miracles those geniuses can do.

 

[nushu2]

Copy/paste will work fine into Word but it is tedious. You can change fonts and make corrections later.

Gone through crashes twice. Got an external hard drive that I use as a backup device. If it was a virus, chances are that data can be recovered.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

Well, the guy who changed the hard drive took the old one. I guess I could call him up and ask him about recovering stuff, but you know, half of me has a good riddance attitude about it. I guess I have the feeling that once I've written something, I'm done with it. The good novella is the one that's on Lit. The other one wasn't so great.

I guess I don't really know how I feel about it now. After it happened, I was very blase about it. Only now when I tried and failed to load my backup did I start to miss it. Don;t knwo what's wrong with the back-up. I still don't trust R/W CD's, and I guess this is why.

But you know, it just makes you wonder what the fuck you're doing writing all this stuff into the air if it can disappear that easily. I have to load all this software now and I'm amazed at how many discs are just screwed up: scratched or marred or just unreadable. I thought CD's were supposed to last forever.

The problem with copying and pasting from Lit is that it preserves the Lit formatting in Word, the margins and all. I think I have to save the pasted version as an RTF or something.

Where's Harold? He knows. Singularity does too.

---dr.M.

 

[CharleyH]

The problem with copying and pasting from Lit is that it preserves the Lit formatting in Word, the margins and all. I think I have to save the pasted version as an RTF or something.

Dr.M, I happen to be talking to someone in the know at this moment who relays the following:

"if that is happening to him, it means that he's copying the text including the title, which means it comes within a table. If he pastes it as unformatted text, that will not happen. There would be other issues that an RTF would correct, but none of them are with Word."

 

[Liar]

When copying and pasting from the web, I always paste it into the simplest editor there is on a Windows machine: Notepad.

That cleans out all the dumbass web formatting and leaves plain text.

 

[sincerely_helene]

I'm sorry to hear of your loss, Doctor. I have undergone a similar circumstance, and my feelings were much as yours: extreme grief and frusteration of not having a back-up at first, but then later a sense of freedom that comes along with starting fresh on a blank canvas. It's not always such a bad thing to put the past behind us.

As mentioned, there are people who can restore your former drive. I had that option, but then decided a few days later it just wasn't important enough to me to fork out the 100 some odd bucks.

I suppose you need to look at it from this angle: Do I actually need the back-up, or do just I want the added sense of security. Mine always seem important at the time, but months later wind up as a drink coaster collecting dust.

 

[Lisa Denton]

Well, the guy who changed the hard drive took the old one. I guess I could call him up and ask him about recovering stuff, but you know, half of me has a good riddance attitude about it. I guess I have the feeling that once I've written something, I'm done with it. The good novella is the one that's on Lit. The other one wasn't so great.

I guess I don't really know how I feel about it now. After it happened, I was very blase about it. Only now when I tried and failed to load my backup did I start to miss it. Don;t knwo what's wrong with the back-up. I still don't trust R/W CD's, and I guess this is why.

But you know, it just makes you wonder what the fuck you're doing writing all this stuff into the air if it can disappear that easily. I have to load all this software now and I'm amazed at how many discs are just screwed up: scratched or marred or just unreadable. I thought CD's were supposed to last forever.

The problem with copying and pasting from Lit is that it preserves the Lit formatting in Word, the margins and all. I think I have to save the pasted version as an RTF or something.

Where's Harold? He knows. Singularity does too.

---dr.M.

I've had the formatting problems before and straightened them out in word. But you can also do like someone suggested and go with notebook and also wordpad. Sometimes when you copy something into notbook or wordpad and then copy it into word it changes it around. Take a few sentences and play with them like that.

 

[mismused]

Doc

I've copied from Lit to Word Perfect in the past, maybe about six months ago, and it worked okay. Copied it just like it was posted by Lit. I also copy what I sent to Lit from the space we input our copied story to, and that always works. Again, I copy to Word Perfect.

For back up, I keep my stuff on my Zip drive. So far, so good. May it always be so.

Good luck.

mismused

 

[Weird Harold]

The problem with copying and pasting from Lit is that it preserves the Lit formatting in Word, the margins and all. I think I have to save the pasted version as an RTF or something.

Where's Harold? He knows. Singularity does too.

---dr.M.

I just C&P'd page one of one of your stories to double check what it does.

First, do NOT use Select All to select what you're going to C&P because that copies the table information and ads as well as the text.

To C&P from a lit page into MS Word 97:

Select the first character of the story title, press END, press shift and click on the last character of the text to select just the text of the story without the table information.

Press Ctrl-C to copy the selction to the clipboard.

position the cursor at the end of an open document or where you want to insert the text; Press Ctrl-V to paste the text.

Repeat as required for multiple lit pages or stories.

When you have the full text copied, replace the Manual Line Breaks with Paragraph breaks using Ctrl-H and the special characters list in the "more" section of the find and replace dialogue.
---

You can use Paste Special -- Unformated Text and skip the find and replace step, but that will lose any Italics or Bold formatting in the Story. You'll have two paragraphs breaks instead of two manual line breaks separating paragraphs with the unformatted text option.

A Lit Story pasted this way uses two Manual Line Breaks to separate each paragraph of the story, but it is otherwise a normal Word format document. The special character find and replace function can convert the two manual line breaks to to either one or two Paragraph breaks in one operation to conform to your preferences.

(Turn On the View Invisible Characters function to see how your paragraphs are separated, but the Find and Replace function doesn't need them visible to replace them.)

 

[BlackShanglan]

Glad you could all take the loss of files philosophically, but ...

Got a new coaster over here

Shanglan

 

[sincerely_helene]

Hey, Doctor.

Just another suggestion that I forgot to include in my previous post:

Be sure to check the disk from another computer before discarding. CD's are funny that way. I usually gift the ones that don't work for me, because they are occasionally compatable with other roms.

 

[matriarch]

The problem with copying and pasting from Lit is that it preserves the Lit formatting in Word, the margins and all. I think I have to save the pasted version as an RTF or something.

---dr.M.

Doc,

I copy from Lit to Word all the time.

All you need to do, is have your page set up showing field codes and margin texts, and when you paste, it will show you then that what you have copied is a series of cells within a table format.

Highlight the text only (not select all), go to 'table', click on table, select 'convert', select 'table to text', and it will take out the cell divisions, and simply leave the text.

You can again select all, change the font; also change the margins, whatever. Its the work of a matter of a few seconds. Repeat this for each page, simply pasting it in the new document following on the previous page.

Then save it.

Honest. It isn't difficult.

Sorry to hear about the hard drive, I went through the same thing, but I still have the old hard drive, I intend to buy an external drive box, slot in the drive, connect it to my pc with a ribbon connector, and set it up as an extra hard drive, then work on it myself. I know the stuff is on there, I took into the pc shop, they set it up on a comp in their work room, and it was all there. They were going to copy it all to CDs for me, but I didn't want anyone seeing my work, (yeah, I know, wuzz - my problem).

Like you, its the photographs, and the correspondence, saved mails over a period of 2 or 3 years that really hurts.

Good luck.

Mat

 

[impressive]

Oh, how FUCKING frustrating!

I always e-mail my material to myself & keep folders for completed work & work in progress. If I'm using a host that has ample online storage (Yahoo! recently bumped to 100Mb and Excite plans to do so next month), I'll send attached files. If not, I just paste into the body of the message.

It has saved my ass on several occasions.

 

[TheEarl]

Doc - If you can get your old hard drive back, then it might be possible to slave it up to your new one. Windows XP has fairly special data recovery tools (Microsoft did somethign right! ) and you might be able to get something back. All else fails, you could try posting it to me and I'll have a look for you, but I couldn't guarantee anything. Definitely second the recommendation of taking it to your local computer repair shop; I'm working in one atm (can you tell?) and there should be something that can be done.

My condolences if you can't rescue the work. I lost an entire notepad of work on a plane and that hurt more than anything.

The Earl

 

[smoochypig]

Re the CD RW not being useful; chances are if it was a RW not CDR disk then the disk hasn't been 'closed' for reading on any standard computer. While working with an RW so you can continuously add/remove files it needs to have the support of a DirectCD or Drive Letter Access driver in order to access it.

You might be able to read the contents of the CDRW if you just install your cd burning software including the DirectCD and or DLA software then try reading the disk.

Apologies if you've already tried that, but it's the one reason I can think of that a CDRW would not be readable directly other than a scratched disk.

 

[Alex De Kok]

Fit a second drive and use the 'Scheduled Tasks' facility to copy critical data files on a regular basis. That way, it's automated and you don't need to remember to do it. An external drive could be used, too. Or go the RAID route with two drives.

For those who've had drive problems, involving a reinstallation of Windows, Restorer 2000 may be worth a look. Go here to see what it's all about. I managed to recover most of my files when it happened to me. Now if someone can tell me how to remember not to save a blank file with the same name as the one I've spent all day on . . .

Alex

 

[Pure]

Matriarch.
thanks a lot for the advice on getting rid of tables.!

J.