Help

I'm trying to recover 6 hours of work in Word can anyone help? I'd been working in word and regularly updating the save of my document to our external hard drive. After finishing spell checking the whole doc...yes it was that late, the message came back along the lines that the file format had changed and it needed converting. The file name had changed on the external hard drive with the first two letters replaced with ~$. There was no evidence of the original file anywhere to be found either on the external hard drive or on the computer, except for the old file name being listed in the drop down 4 recent files in word. Clicking on this just returned a message that the field could not be found. Trying to convert the new ~$ file through putting the Office XP disk back in as directed on screen resulted in about 10 words from the first two lines of the 10 page document reappearing....not a lot of use.

Reading other forums it appears ~$ files are the temp owner files, but it does not answer where the original is.

Can't seem to find an answer as to where the original file has gone or how it can be recovered. Any help greatly appreciated????