Corrupted Word Doc? Please help!

[Marienna]

Hi all,

I was preparing notes for a presentation to my university class on a friend's laptop (because the harddrive on mine was failing, it's now been replaced) when suddenly, all the text became Chinese characters and numbers. I'm thinking it may be corrupted?

I have no idea what happened, but I'm now in the crisis-situation of finding a way to retrieve the file, or starting all over again! Any help greatly appreciated - some relevant information:

1. I type fast, so it's possible I may have accidentally tapped a shortcut on the keyboard that I didn't know about and done this myself - not sure.


2. The laptop I was working on at the time had basically zero space on the harddrive, and was flashing warnings of lack of memory maybe causing reduced performance - the machine was also pretty slow.
3. It's not the font - that was the first thing I checked
4. I've tried saving the file in different formats, PDF, etc. but it doesn't seem to help. It's still just gibberish.

Thanks in advance, long live internet forums and free information sharing, down with SOPA, etc