Thank you for being a valued part of the CNET community. As of December 1, 2020, the forums are in read-only format. In early 2021, CNET Forums will no longer be available. We are grateful for the participation and advice you have provided to one another over the years.

Thanks,

CNET Support

General discussion

Corrupt Office 2003 files

by ahardy4 Sep 28, 2007 3:48AM PDT

Hello,

I have some files which I retrieved with undelete. Most of the files recovered ok, but some of them came back with the data either all ***** and a second file with the same name, but as a doc;0 file type. If you know of anything that may have caused this and a way to recover the data please let me know.

Discussion is locked

2 Posts

- Collapse + Expand Details

- Collapse -

Re: undeleted files corrupted

by Kees Bakker Sep 28, 2007 4:03AM PDT

Yes, that may happen. The success of undeleting is uncertain. That's inherent to the mechanism. And it's why Microsoft implemented the recycle bin.

You can try to rename the .doc;0 in .doc, and that's about all you can do.

And, by the way, such things happening is why some people do a regular BACKUP. They copy their files to CD or DVD or an external hard disk or another PC in their home network or even a USB stick. If anything happens to the original, they simply retrieve (the official term is RESTORE) the copy from the backup.
Other people don't do that, and have a much greater risk of losing their data. Their choice.

Kees

- Collapse -

Why.

by r. proffitt Forum moderator Sep 28, 2007 4:04AM PDT

It's pretty simple why recovered files that are undeleted are corrupt. Once the clusters are marked as available unless the owner pulls the power there is a chance the OS will overwrite a few sectors or clusters.

The only real solution is to yank the power then pull the drive off line. The undelete is then run on another machine with the drive to do data recovery in some USB case or slaved to the other machine. This way we don't write to the drive until we get files back.

Very few will do this but will install undelete software and overwrite the very space they need to recover from.

Hopefully this will help you understand "Why?"

Bob

Back to Office & Productivity Software forum