RISC OS 3 Acorn Archimedes A3000

I wonder if anyone can help?
I recently had an A3000 returned to me from a repairer – leaking CMOS battery, and a broken solder joint leading to the HDD. I find that a great many, possibly all, files, still exist, but they have a blank icon, and will not load into Edit, Draw, or Ovation.
Any ideas, please?
P C Hall

There are a lot of possibilities, if your hard disc has been intermittent.

Go to the command line and navigate to where your files are with *Dir. Does *EX list sensible-looking file information?

Sensible time-stamps and file lengths? If not, there has been disc corruption while writing the directory. This is bad.

Are the filetypes unrecognised but still sensible numbers? Does it show Draw files as “Drawfile” or as “&AFF”? Does it show what you know to be Ovation files as “Ovation” or “&CDD”?

If you *DUMP a file, does it look like it has plausible contents?

If your battery was faulty, the configuration is likely to be wrong – have you reconfigured the machine correctly? Perhaps it is just that your apps haven’t been booted?

What versionof RISC OS is the A3000 running? RISC OS 3 or 2?
As Nemo says, do the files have the right filetypes? To find this, click the middle mouse button over the file, go to the File ‘xyz’ submenu (where ‘xyz’ is the filename), and then go to ‘Info’ to see what filetype it is (or do it from the command line like Nemo suggests, if you’re familiar with command line stuff on RISC OS). Textfiles should be &FFF, DrawFiles &AFF and Ovation files &CDD or &CDC

Thank you. I have found the problem. Please bear in mind that I had not had this machine switched on for 20 years. All files were viewed through CFS, a file compression system to make space on the 35 MB HDD. Once I launched CFS, I could see all my files again. Thank you for your suggestions. This was a memory failure – on my part.