How to recover Doc file?

[ryscholes]

Hi guys,

I'm going to try to explain this the best I can, but please excuse me if it's a bit difficult to understand!

Basically, my girlfriend has her final assignments for her last year of college to be handed in on Friday, and the saved file has become corrupt. With me working in IT support, I was the first person she came to.. But I've become stuck!

I'm not sure how she managed it, but she's saved them as a regular File with no extension. So basically she has files like 'Assignment 1'. (See picture here) http/imgur.com/EgqZAe9

She needs this to be a word document... Or something she can open. She's using Open Office so i imagine an .odt would work? But .doc and .docx should be fine.

Does anyone know what she can do? Or what I can do? It's a years worth of work, I know its ridiculous that it wasn't backed up onto another drive or computer but it's too late for that.

Things I've tried

- Adding file extension onto end of the file. This turned it into a .doc file, but when trying to open it it said it was corrupt and couldnt open ('The file assignment 3.docx cannot be opened because there are problems with the contents.')
- Checking for any previous versions etc.


I tried creating a test word document (completely new document, from scratch). I made changes and saved over it a few times to see if I could use EaseUS Data recovery software to recover a previous version, this worked and found the previous version of the file... But then the file has ~$ before it and when I try to open it it says the same thing about it being corrupt, but I'm guessing this is for a different reason because it's just a temporary file. Is there any way to open this temporary file because if so I could run this software on her pen drive and recover a previous (hopefully working) version of the file?

Any help would be so appreciated, a years worth of work is potentially going to be lost here

Thanks

Ryan

 

[Someone Somewhere]

Rename the file back to ODT and open it with openoffice. Then save it as a .doc/.docx. Just changing the extension will confuse it.

 

[ryscholes]

Rename the file back to ODT and open it with openoffice. Then save it as a .doc/.docx. Just changing the extension will confuse it.

Not working mate, won't open at all says its corrupt.

 

[ryscholes]

Will open in WordPad, but gives this sort of thing, over lots of pages.

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t]¾çiD)©WåAò>×`¦Ô¬>£<Ö>ª±ÏÑ“aE¸ZæÙ¤¾€ú-µxg²†=ˆûÕµâ&.¨±ÁҝTÒ¬j–`©”3w„¯k,TR 9ÈÇlgœóR{NÒŒ³Gݏ!Û•bÒéqØՐ$¾ƴMeô9ºï °ëa'qX{ãz“ØW×ÿ

 

[Someone Somewhere]

Even as .odt?

Just downloaded OpenOffice; having a look now.

 

[ryscholes]

Even as .odt?

Just downloaded OpenOffice; having a look now.

Yeah It seems like its properly corrupted.. Accordingly there's a tickbox when saving in OpenOffice which when unticked doesn't automatically add an extension, so obviously she's saved it from there with no extension and then closed it down not knowing... Then she's gone to check it over before handing it in Friday and realised that it's not saved as it should!

Thanks for trying to help, hope we can get a solution, I actually feel so bad

People have suggested changing the file extension to a .zip, then extracting the contents.xml file from there and opening it in an xml viewer. I tried this, you can see the contents.xml which they say to look for, but you cant open or extract or move it anywhere... It says that's corrupted too!

 

[Someone Somewhere]

Can she open it currently? What changed?

If it can be opened even on that PC, just hit 'save as'.

Also try: .sxw, .uot, .xml

 

[ryscholes]

Can she open it currently? What changed?

If it can be opened even on that PC, just hit 'save as'.

Also try: .sxw, .uot, .xml

Unfortunately not working

 

[ryscholes]

Can she open it currently? What changed?

If it can be opened even on that PC, just hit 'save as'.

Also try: .sxw, .uot, .xml

There's only one copy of it and it's the one on the memory stick which has the issue.. Other than that there's no other instances of the file! She's rubbish with computers, looks like she's managed to either overwrite it or deleted the old one thinking the new one had saved properly.. I'm not even sure!

 

[Someone Somewhere]

If you go back onto the PC, with the USB stick inserted, can you see it in the recent items list? That can be helpful when you're not sure where a file is.

 

[chcw]

It is better for you to provide the hexidecimal contents in your file so that I can know the possible file format it can be.

You said you have tried to add .doc or docx extension to the file name. Then try to open it. I assume you are trying to open it in OpenOffice.

If you have Word, then you can try the recovery function integrated with Microsoft Word, as follows:

1) On the File menu, click Open.
2) In the Look in list, click the drive, folder, or Internet location that contains the file that you want to open.
3) In the folder list, locate and open the folder that contains the file.
4) Select the file that you want to recover.
5) Click the arrow next to the Open button, and then click Open and Repair.

You may find more information about this at:

http/office.microsoft.com/en-us/word-help/recover-the-text-from-a-damaged-document-HP005189610.aspx (for Word 2003)
http/support.microsoft.com/kb/893672/en-us (for Word 2007/2010/2013)

If Word's open and repair function does not work, then you may try third-party tools such as DataNumen Word Repair at

http/www.datanumen.com/word-repair/

to try to repair the file as a .doc file or as a .docx file. You can try both cases.

If both cases fail, then you may try to repair the temporary file existing on your drive or the one recovered as you have mentioned, DataNumen Word Repair is also able to recover tempoary file, see below:

http/www.datanumen.com/word-repair/recover-temp-file.htm

Hope this will help.

Good luck!

Good luck!