Hello.


I have been asked if I could help recover anything from a 40 page Word document that apparently refused to open and became corrupted after the owner inserted some pictures from an external USB drive.


All the usual recovery options fail.


When I look at a copy of the file with notepad I can see that it has what appear to be Word headers, font information and external file locations further down the document, however all the data in the file is gobbledygook.


I wonder if somehow the font information has been misconfigured causing all the data to look random.


I tried DataNumen Word file repair and it came back with a failure.


Anyone with any idea please. I can attach the file if anyone is interested?


Thanks,
Russell.

You can attach the file if you want someone to try.

Some people have had success opening corrupted files in other software such as LibreOffice or Wordpad. Have you tried other software?

Also a docx file is actually a zip file. You could try unzipping to see if there is any valid content in the file.

__________________
Andrew Lockton
Chrysalis Design, Melbourne Australia

Hello and thank you for responding.


I have tried unzipping the file and it has managed to extract media andvarious configuration and font XML files but sadly none of the actual text which is the most important part..


The owner of the file has agreed to release the file in the hope that someone may find the answer. Here is a link to it in my Google Drive:
Loading Google Docs


Hopefully you can access it.


Thanks.

I didn't have any luck trying to open your file. It looks to me like it is too far gone for recovery.

I tried Zoho Writer, Word's Open and Recover, Notepad++, Wordpad and 7-Zip. Wordpad did open the stream but there was nothing recognisable in it apart from the listing of graphics which must have been in the file.

__________________
Andrew Lockton
Chrysalis Design, Melbourne Australia

Hello Andrew.


Thanks for having a look. I did manage to unzip it in repair mode using MacOS Unarchiver, but this couldn't find any text which is the most important part.


I don't know what the history of the failure was. Apparently the owner added some files from an external drive and Word crashed. He spent some time trying to retrieve it, but When I got to his machine several days later, sadly there is no trace of temporary files or anything.


What gets me is that the text is probably still in the document, it's just probably still encrypted in some way.


Thank you for your help.


Best wishes,
Russell.

"external drive?"
Flash drive storage accessed from within Word is probably the most frequent source of document corruption. Word does not play well with this medium.