Open recovered .doc and it's garbage.

[Rob67401]

Running WinXP and these are MS Office XP (2002? maybe 2003?) document and spreadsheet files. The My Document directory and files are recovered from a drive that had been partitioned and the OS had been reinstalled.

The recovered .pdf, .jpg, and some other file extensions open fine. The MS files do not. Using OOo, I get a pop-up asking for ASCII Filter Options, Character Set, Default fonts, Language, and Paragraph breaks which I can change to get a different bunch of junk but it's all junk; squares, #, and other junk.

Word Pad opens them to the same or similar junk. My computer guy tried his MS Office and recovery stuff and can not properly open these files. Last I heard, he was still cussing at the junk (he uses another term for it).

OOo opens some other MS files that were on this computer; same files just not the latest version. Those files are not recovered from the partitioned drive. I've lost a few months of work; since October. Bah!

I attached a Word .doc.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks either way.

Rob

[squenson]

Were these files created with OOo or MS Word? If this this with Word, with all respects, what makes you feel that a file not recovered by Microsoft tool can be recovered by OOo? I suggest you post your message in an MS Office forum, you will have slightly more chances of success. Your file looks deeply corrupted, so don't expect miracles.

[Rob67401]

Heh. I "feel" that no one can help, as far as that goes. However, I've been reasonably working on this for a couple weeks and it's not about how I "feel."

I thought I would give this forum a shot before I write off these files. Moreover, I am, after all, running OOo and not MS Office.

[Hagar Delest]

What do you mean exactly by "recovered"? Have you just picked them up from the drive or have you used a restore application to get them back to life?

The file loaded is definitively not a .doc file. Remove the '#' characters (Find and replace, find all and replace by nothing) and you'll get some text. It seems to be a log. See attachment.

[foxcole]

Heh. I "feel" that no one can help, as far as that goes. However, I've been reasonably working on this for a couple weeks and it's not about how I "feel."

Hey, now. That was a polite way of asking. Don't be so literal.

I thought I would give this forum a shot before I write off these files. Moreover, I am, after all, running OOo and not MS Office.

Well, first of all, OOo is not MS Office. OOo has filters that work as well as possible with MSO files but MS formats have until very recently been closed and secret, so the best anyone could do was guess at how it all worked. OOo does a very good job, but it's not perfect and because the underlying technology is so different, it is not an MSO clone and cannot be considered to be the same thing at all.

But, that's neither here nor there. Here's what I found in the header of the corrupted .doc sample:
32 00 78 00 21 00 25 00

According to this site, here are the valid file headers for .doc and .docx files:

ms doc file headers.png (4.44 KiB) Viewed 4922 times

In fact, there are no valid file headers on that page that begin with 32 00. It's not a comprehensive list, so I also searched with Google and did not find that string. I think it's safe to say the file headers have been separated from the files in some way, and the files are no longer machine-readable.

Word files also have information at the end of the file and if that information is missing, the file is still not readable. The sample file is also missing this information. I tried to see if I could insert your file's information into a new Word document, but wasn't able to do it with the tool I have. Could be I just don't know how yet.

[faith.workman]

The same exact thing happened to me. I only use OpenOffice but I save all my documents as .doc so I am able to open them in Microsoft Word lest the situation arises. My computer shut down spontaneously as I was in the midst of writing a paper for school, and everytime I try opening the document it shows up as a series of number signs. I hate technology!

[Hagar Delest]

But .doc format is not really a great piece of technology! You just experienced it. With open formats like ODF, even if the file is wrecked, you can open it and retrieve some of its content.

[TheGurkha]

We're closing the stable door after the horse has bolted, but it is better to work in OOo format and then export to .doc or PDF when you need to shre the file.