§ 8.01-392.When court order book or equivalent is lost or illegible, what matters may be reentered.

Court order books hold a court’s memory — every judgment, decree, and order the court entered lives there. Section 8.01-392 is the fix for when that memory gets damaged. If the book, microfilm record, or other form of record containing a court’s judgments, decrees, orders, or proceedings is lost, destroyed, or becomes illegible, the court is not stuck with a permanent gap.

The fix works as long as the missing matters can be reconstructed correctly from some other writing — a copy that survived elsewhere, a clerk’s working notes, anything reliable enough to establish exactly what the original entry said. Where that reconstruction is possible, the court can direct its clerk to reenter those matters into the record.

The reentry is not treated as a lesser substitute. The section gives it the same effect as the original entry, so once the clerk reenters a judgment or order that was lost, the reconstructed version carries the same legal weight going forward as if the original book had never been damaged at all.