Virus or MS Word Prob?? Pls Help!!!

[BaLi - X]

I am having a very bad time now, what happened is that i downloaded all my
data (my last 8 years final backup) on my external hard drive as i had to
reinstall my PC. later on i connected that External HDD to another friends
laptop for some work. Now i have reinstalled my PC and everything but when i
open any EXCEL or WORD document a box opens title says " File Conversion" and
then it says

Selects the encoding that makes your document readable, Text Encoding 1.
Windows (Default) 2. Ms-Dos 3. Other Encoding

which ever encoding i select it has garbage in the file.. i can't read.. all
my life long work from past 8 years are depends on it .. any one please help

 

[Terry Farrell]

Well it suggests that the restored files are all corrupted. What backup
software did you use or did you just copy all the documents to the USB
drive? I guess that you are saying that you no longer have a backup?

 

[BaLi - X]

Yes my friend, i did copy all the documents just as normal copy / paste
thing.. and the worst thing is that i do not have any sort of backup any
more. anything you suggest. thankxs for your response though

 

[Terry Farrell]

Would you like to send me one of the documents as an attachment to an email
and I will have a look and see if it is corruption and if it can be rescued.

Terry

Yes my friend, i did copy all the documents just as normal copy / paste
thing.. and the worst thing is that i do not have any sort of backup any
more. anything you suggest. thankxs for your response though

 

[BaLi - X]

could u pls write me ur email address mayt.. thnkxs for all ur help though

 

[Terry Farrell]

If you right-click on my Name under 'from' and select Properties, it
displays my address which is (e-mail address removed)

Terry

could u pls write me ur email address mayt.. thnkxs for all ur help though

 

[Terry Farrell]

The document you send has a bad header. This means it will not open as a
Word document but almost all the data is recoverable if you open it using
the Recover Text from Any File option in the File Open dialog. This probably
means that the other files have a similar damage and I would expect most of
them to open that way. If you find any that won't open at all. try opening
them in WordPad (which uses a similar file format to Word docs).

Terry

could u pls write me ur email address mayt.. thnkxs for all ur help though

 

[Jarral]

I am a victim too and faced similar problem in 2004. I guess it is a virus.
I have'nt yet found a solution. But today I surfed for recovery tools and
tried some of them[Demo version like AWR, WFix, WordRecovery 3.0] .
WordRecover 3.0 was able to recover the text but not formatting. You can try
similar tool. Let me know if another works fine. As a solotion I always make
backup of my doc files on CD on weekly basis. This problem is on word ver
upto 2003 and new version with SP2 are immune to this issue, a friend told.