Problem opening old word documents

[Gene]

I have many documents written in MS Word 2000 that open
showing little more than pages of "boxes" like
these "" and only a few recognizable
characters. I'm still using the same Word 2000 program
that I used to write these documents. This has happened
to me in the past and I've had to retype the documents -
I'd like to avoid that. Can anyone help me recover these?

 

[TF]

Gene

This indicates that the documents are damaged beyond repair. There are two
probable causes:

You have been infected with a virus that replaces contents of documents with
garbage.
You have moved the files by transferring them to removable media and
corrupted them in the process: this is particularly problematic if you use
floppy disks or if you save directly to the removable media instead
(instead, you should save to your local hard disk and then COPY the flies to
the removable media and vice versa to open them again).



I have many documents written in MS Word 2000 that open
showing little more than pages of "boxes" like
these "" and only a few recognizable
characters. I'm still using the same Word 2000 program
that I used to write these documents. This has happened
to me in the past and I've had to retype the documents -
I'd like to avoid that. Can anyone help me recover these?