Corrupted files

[miscrosoftuser]

My laptop computer recently had a mother board that fried and had to get a
new one. Before taking the computer in for repair, I had all of my documents
backed up on DVDs. When I reinstalled Office 2007, I receive error messages
on some documents saying that the file is corrupted. Is there any way to
recover the data on this corrupted file? I have tried to open the files by
using plain text but all I get is scrambled letters and numbers and signs.

 

[Terry Farrell]

Try opening them with WordPad or Open Office. But to see how badly corrupt
they are (presuming they are docx format), rename them with a .zip extension
and then unzip the files. They should unzip into several xml files: if they
don't, then the documents are beyond rescue. If they are doc format, try the
Open and Repair option in Word.

 

[miscrosoftuser]

I have downloaded Open Office and did not have luck with opening some of the
files. I tried opening files in WordPad and again, didnt have much luck.

How do you rename the file to a zip extension? When I tried to do a "save
as" it did not give me that option.

I think my data is a lost cause as this point

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

View the file in a Windows Explorer window (My Computer or Computer). Click
the filename twice (slowly, don't double-click) or right-click and choose
Rename. Select the extension and change it.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
http://word.mvps.org

 

[tooolnut]

You rename it in Windows Explorer. First you must make sure that your
Tools/"Folder Options"/View setting "Hide Extensions for known file types" is
unchecked (if you don't see the Tools menu, press Alt). Then right-click the
".docx" file in Explorer and select Rename from the drop-down list (or click
on the filename twice in slow succession) and overwrite the file extension
with ".zip".

The problem remains: how to repair the corrupted part. In my case, it
appears to be the /word/document.xml, which can be opened in a browser but
not in Word.

 

[Terry Farrell]

Or select it (in Windows Explorer) and press F2.

Terry

 

[Yves Dhondt]

You can open an xml file with almost any text editor. Of course, using an
xml editor will most give you some advantages as you can probably reformat
the xml from 1 long line of text to a nice outline where you can easily see
the open and close tags (the things between < and >).

Depending on where the error was located, it is sometimes enough to just
remove one or two elements, like for example a bad behaving table, to
recover everything in your document but the bad behaving item.

Yves

 

[miscrosoftuser]

Thank you everyone for your suggestions. I was still unsuccessful on being
able to open the files.