DOCUMENT NAME OR PATH INVALID

[Tam Nguyen]

Hi, yesterday I saved a 55-page Word Document to my
PC100 Iomega Zip Disk.
I made changes to the document later, but was unable to
save the changes. It said the file was inaccessible, and
recommended I see the File Preferences or Formatting--
something similar to that.
So, I closed my document and tried to access it again,
but a box popped up that said "Document name or path not
valid. Check to make sure the path is correct or try and
search for your document by clicking on the File dialog
box, and selectiong Options."
But after I clicked Okay on the box, my Word document
disappeared from my zip disk! I couldn't find it
anywhere. I saved it to my zip, so it couldn't have been
deleted without my knowing, right? Also, it wasn't
hidden, becuase I checked. What is going on, and can
someone help me?

Thanks, tam

 

[Jezebel]

Commiserations. You've joined the long list of people who have discovered
the hard way why you should never save a Word document directly to removable
media. For future reference, always save to your hard disk; then use
Explorer to copy to the removable medium.

The problem is that when Word is working on a document it creates a copy and
does the work on that, reading and writing the copy continually. When you
save, the original is updated and the copy is deleted. This intensive disk
access -- apart from being much slower than working on a hard disk -- very
often corrupts the document.

In the meantime: copy the contents of the ZIP disk to your hard drive. Check
for a Word backup. If there is a corrupt version of your original file, try
opening it using the 'Recover text from any file' option on the File Open
dialog. Failing that, you're probably out of luck.

 

[Chip Orange]

Go into the tools menu | options | save tab. Examine the checkbox labeled
"make local copy of files stored on network or removable drives" and uncheck
it if it is checked. This option, while designed to speed up such file
editing, seemed to cause us a lot of lost or corrupted files and we finally
disabled it for all our users.

hth,

Chip