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General discussion

Documents corrupted after moving

Sep 5, 2005 5:40AM PDT

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?

Discussion is locked

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Re: corrupted Word documents
Sep 5, 2005 6:13AM PDT

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

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RE: corrupted files
Sep 5, 2005 10:02AM PDT

More detailed information is needed. Kees has asked some pertinent questions, and I have a couple more. First, just exactly what did he cut, and where on the D drive did he paste it. If he did not do it properly, it is possible a transformation occurred. Did the files automatically retain their original file names?

Second, what do these rows of characters he now sees look like? Are they the text of the document, but without formatting? Are they mainly text characters and symbols in a somewhat random order? Are they mainly square boxes with some characters and symbols mixed in?

I have a couple of ideas as to what may have happened, but I need the above information to pin things down. If what I fear actually happened, I fear the files are lost.

As Kees said, it is best to have good backups on removable media before messing with files. Actually, for any important data, you should have at least two separate backups. Also echoing Kees, you should have some assurance that your backups are proper and can be recovered before depending on them. I understand, your son probably thought he was backing up his data when he copied(?) those files to the D drive ? but something went horribly awry.

Provide us with the additional information, and Kees and I and others may be able to help more.

Frank

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corrupted docs
Sep 5, 2005 8:57PM PDT

- He cut from his My Documents folder to a documents folder he created on the D drive.

-The files did retain their original names.

-The characters are rows of Y's with two dots over them.

I have already given him the lecture you and Kees have given me, and I think he has learned his lesson. We downloaded Recovermydata and are running it on the c drive from the d drive to see if it will work, and if it does he will have to decide if he wants to purchase that, which is pretty expensive. Let me know if you have any other ideas. Many thanks, Mary

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Corrupted docs
Sep 5, 2005 8:53PM PDT

-He reinstalled Office 2000, and the documents still looked bad.

-The file size looks reasonable.

-They still have the .doc extension.

-We did try on to send to another computer, same result.

-They look the same in Wordpad and Notepad.

Thanks for your help.

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Re: corrupted files
Sep 6, 2005 6:49AM PDT

Mary,

I remember seeing rows of y's in certain circumstances, but I can't remember when exactly. But I'm rather sure it shows it's not a regular Word file.

The internal structure of Word documents is complex and undocumented for the normal soul like me. Still, I would like to have a look at
a) Two of those corrupted files, and
b) A document you made after the reformat/reinstall with Word 2000, to compare with.
A hex-editor tells so much more than Word about the real contents of the file.

Can you send me your email-address via the forum mail? Then I'll send you mine, and you can send me those three files. Although I will delete them afterwards and certainly consider them confidential, please choose or make an innocent document.
After you send me the files, can you do a scandisk on the d:-drive and report on it here? It might contain irregularities as cross-linked files that would be an possible explanation. But don't repair anything, just diagnose. I don't really expect any errors, but it's good to know your disk is OK.

At the moment, I don't have the faintest idea what Frank hints at as a possible cause. It's still a mystery to me. He'll probably tell. He might be interested in the files also, so keep a copy in your Sent Items.

And it would be nice to know the reason for the reformat. You don't comment on my question if there could be a possible relation between that reason and this problems. After all, the files could already be corrupted BEFORE the move.

Kees

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Thanks for the help
Sep 7, 2005 10:46AM PDT

Thanks so much for the help guys. I went home to get the files and do some more work, and it turns out my son got impatient and formatted his computer again, and the evidence it gone. Oh, the impatience of youth! I have learned from your comments and am very grateful to you.
Many thanks, Mary

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I think I see
Sep 6, 2005 8:58AM PDT

what must have happened, but the how and why still mystify me. I have tried to duplicate the problem -- but with no success.

The hex code for