Maryfrei,
A nice idea to copy to another hard disk. But obviously he did something wrong, or something went wrong. Could there be any chance the cause is related to the reason of the reformat?
Too bad he didn't check it before reformatting. By the way: copy/paste, then check, is safer than cut/paste, and makes no difference at all if you are planning to format. Too bad also, I assume, he can't get an older version of the documents from another backup, because he never makes it.
All of this is a lesson on backup and the usefulness of a cd- or dvd-burner, I think, and that's the whole story.
Still, a few questions.
- Did he reinstall Office 2000 (or Word 2000)? You don't tell. That doesn't come with Windows XP, of course, but has to be bought and installed separately. If he didn't the file will be opened by Wordpad, and it's very well possible Wordpad won't recognize it and show 'rows' of characters. Your story on Star Office seems to point to corrupted files, of course, but I still ask.
- What about the file sizes on the d:-drive. Are they reasonable for a Word document?
- Do the files indeed have the .doc-extension? If they were changed to rtf, for example, I'm rather sure they won't be recognised.
- Just to be sure: mail one of those corrupted files to your or his work, and try to open it there.
- You can try to open the files with Notepad to recover some of the text (but not much more, I'm afraid).
Hope this helps.
Kees
My son has a Windows XP machine with two hard drives. He cut/pasted his Microsoft Word 2000 documents from the c drive to the d drive, and then reformatted the c drive and reinstalled XP Home Edition. Now, when he opens any of the documents that he pasted on the D drive, they show only rows of characters. Can anything be done to try and recover these documents? I tried demo versions of several recovery programs, and tried opening with Star Office, but no success. Can anyone help?

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