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Thread ID: 34328 2003-06-10 02:05:00 Recovery of corrupted Word doc Jester (13) Press F1
Post ID Timestamp Content User
151439 2003-06-10 02:05:00 Help!

My wife completed an assignment last night, using Word 97, and saved it in the normal manner .

She opened it this morning and it was all unicode type characters like this ¨¡¢¯¥ã¥Òǽ, with many boxes . Some of the existing text is visible amongst all the gibberish, but a lot is missing .

All the other word docs open ok . I have tried opening it in wordpad, notepad, tried renaming it from . doc to . rtf, . txt etc, but no joy .

I have searched through my files for any autosaved versions of the document, but haven't had any joy . Nothing in the temp files either .

I downloaded a trial of WordFix, which basically replaced all the boxes with the word 'demo' and didn't appear to recover any of the missing text .

Can anyone point us in the direstion of a (preferably) free word doc recovery tool .

Thanks in advance

J .
Jester (13)
151440 2003-06-10 02:14:00 Have you looked for *.wbk files?

Another trick is to look for all files with yesterday's date.
There was a post on this general subject not long ago that I and several others commented on so see what PF1 search can offer.

Good luck!

Cheers

Billy 8-{)
Billy T (70)
151441 2003-06-10 02:17:00 In the Word file open dialog (Word 2k - not sure about 97), there is a file type option "recover text from any file". This may extract the remnants that you can see, but I suspect the 'converted' text is gone for good. :| wuppo (41)
151442 2003-06-10 02:23:00 Thanks Billy, but no * . wbk files on system :(

I have searched all files created, modified or accessed as of yesterday's date without success .

I wonder where the 'autosaved' Word temp files are stored? I haven't done a clean out of temps since yesterday AM, so it's likely to be lurking somewhere . . .

J .
Jester (13)
151443 2003-06-10 02:29:00 Jester,

Try downloading and using DocRepair from Word Document Recovery Utility (www.simtel.net)


Cheers, babe.
Babe Ruth (416)
151444 2003-06-10 02:33:00 Jester, Sorry that DocRepair v2.0 also replaces text with the word DEMO until you pay some money...

Babe :-(
Babe Ruth (416)
151445 2003-06-10 02:40:00 Hi Wuppo,

That option tidied the document up a lot, and interestingly, it says ".7C:\WINDOWS\TEMP\AutoRecovery save of the victorians.asd" many times throughout, however I cannot find any .asd files (as suggested by Billy).

It is also repeating paragraphs throughout, like a stuck record.

My wife and I really appreciate all your comments so far

J.
Jester (13)
151446 2003-06-10 02:57:00 If you have repeating text throughout, you probably have 'fast saves' enabled in Word (this appends updated text, rather than re-writing the complete file cleanly).
It's a bit like shutting the barn door after the horse has bolted, but many people recommend disabling fast saves, as it is believed to be one cause of corrupted Word documents. :|
wuppo (41)
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