How to recover from frozen Finder and Word

January 14, 2007 1:24 PM

Word and Finder have frozen on my Mac with a USB flash drive plugged in -- please help me save 8 hours worth of work!

I have been working on two word files that are stored on a USB flash drive plugged into my Mac (Powerbook G4 if that matters). I know that I should have been saving, but I haven't been. Suddenly, the light on my flash drive went out and now neither Word nor Finder is responding. The light on the flash drive has since come back on (and then off, and then on -- every 5-10 minutes), but Word and Finder are still not responding. Is there any way I can recover the work I've done on these files since I last saved?

posted by lionelhutz5 to computers & internet (5 comments total)

If you have AutoSave enabled, and by default I think Word saves every 10 minutes, if you Force Quit the Word application and Relaunch (Force Quit) the Finder, restarting Word will immediately open the most recently autosaved document, so that you can save it to disk. You might lose recent changes, but assuming AutoSave is turned on, at least you won't lose everything.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 1:33 PM on January 14, 2007

Might be worth force-quitting Finder first to see if it frees up Word.
posted by chrismear at 1:39 PM on January 14, 2007

Word is almost certainly autosaving for you - you won't lose much.

Try hitting command-option-ESC to see if that brings up the 'force-quit' menu. Tell it to Relaunch the Finder first; if that doesn't help, you'll probably have to force quit Word.

If the force-quit menu doesn't come up, just reboot.
posted by ikkyu2 at 1:56 PM on January 14, 2007

If you can relaunch the Finder but Word is still hung up, you could do a screengrab and maybe save a little work that way.
posted by bink at 2:21 PM on January 14, 2007

It is important to restart Word. Do not open any document. The autosave feature may attempt to open the temp file even if it had yet to do an autosave.
posted by Gungho at 5:17 PM on January 14, 2007