How do I recover a corrupt PowerPoint presentation

Basically, i have three separate presentations with the same problem and i have read the other thread regarding this and have tried to load the presentation up through Open Office and this has failed. Does any one else have any ideas as these are extremely important to me!!!

F.Y.I - When i open the file within Open Office, it loads up a load of hashes in the writer function of the program.

Hi Bhupinder,

1. The PowerPoint files are password protected and you are trying to open them in an older version of PowerPoint (ie. 2000,97 etc).
2. The ppt files are created on a newer version of PowerPoint than the one you are currently using to attempt to open them with.
3. The ppt files are physically corrupted.

I know it might seem an obvious question but have you tried firstly to open the presentation in a version of PowerPoint such as PowerPoint 2007, or PowerPoint 2010?

It would seem strange to me Bhupinder that all 3 presentations are suffering from the same problem.

Are they copied from a USB key, or burned to a CD? In other words were they created on the hard disk of the machine you are currently using or were they created on another machine, and copied over?

Well, they were created within powerpoint xp and I've tried to open them but they just refuse to actually open. I believe that they are corrupted becasue the entire directory they were saved seems to have only corrupted files. I've tried to open the files within different versions of powerpoint to no success.

They were created on a computer and swapped around and moved onto a usb drive because of the fact that i had to format my computer which they were saved on. Out of all the saved files, this one directory has corrupted files. I guess you could say they were created on a different machine because the computer they were originally created on has been reformated several times.

F.Y.I = My computer has USB 2.0 and i have tried opening the file on the USB hard drive on my laptop which is USB 3.0 which failed. I then saved it onto my mp2 player which also acts as a USB hard drive and tried to open the files on the USB 1.1 computer and that failed as well.

I dont really know why they have become corrupted as they were copied over with a lot of other files that seem to work but the directory with the work files (publisher and powerpoint files) just refuse to open.

STARTING TO LOSE HOPE!

Thanks for clarifying the problem Bhupinder.

It does look very much as if they has been some data corruption, as you say, the whole directory is corrupted.

I had myself a problem a few months back where I had backed up some presentations onto dvd. I tested them from the dvd to make sure they opened and all was fine. Then I deleted the ones from my hard drive directory because I needed to get more space and defragment the drive.

As it turned out, they hadn't backed up correctly at all. It seemed that there was some form of "lag" between the burning of the disc and the data transfer and somewhere along the way the disc decided to dissect the data.

Even though Nero reported the disc had burned and verified correclty, it would not read again once I had shut down the PC and rebooted. On other machines, it would show the name of the disc correclty and even list the list the files, but when I tried to open one...they refused to open.

I'm not sure Bhupinder, but I think you have suffered something similar albeit through USB.

There are many devices claiming that they are "backup" drives, I have a mobile phone from Sony that claims it is also. It has a 4GB memory duo card in it, so it would be perfect if it were true. Works on USB as well.

However, the truth is that it seems that in respect to media files, and by that MP3, JPG, MPG, etc, it does seem to work, and transfer correctly. I have backed up a Word document on it, and then transferred it back, and guess what....It won't open!

I haven't figured that out at all...in my mind bit copy means precisely that. Bit copy. But it seems it is not always the case. I know the file allocation and file format of the memory card in the phone is completely different to that of a PC, ie. FAT32 etc., so this may have something to do we it....but again, I don't see how.

Back to the directory, I think that somewhere during the transfers Bhupinder, there has been a cross directory.

You sometimes see this when you run CHKDSK on Windows, it seems on rare occasion, Windows can be a bit temperamental and while files are bieng saved it somehow forgets or loses its positioning, and we get cross directory files. Parts of files saved across directories instead of in one. When you run CHKDSK, Windows then sees these as bad data and removes them all.

I think Bhupinder, as I say somewhere along the way something like this would appear to have happened to your directory. The directory is there. The file names are there. But not all, or only parts of the data seems to be there which is why they refuse to open.

You may be lucky Bhupinder, a good data recovery software may be able to reconstruct the files, providing the other parts of the data are still scrambled somewhere on the drive. It's a long shot I know...a very long shot...but I think from your explanation, it is the only one left.

Unfortunately, they seem to have been infinitely lost however, my luck seems to have turned and i have found the hard copy (I printed the presentations and publisher documents out) so this at least covers for the loss of the original documents.

Thanks for your help though!!