Error not a WinWord6

[lynseyhumes]

Hi,

I have an open office writer document that when I try to open it it is giving an error not a winword6 file. I don't know what has happened to it as it is a file I have been working on for a long time and has just suddenly crashed like this. Do you know if there is any way to recover the file??? Any help would be massively appreciated!!!
Thanks in advance

[FJCC]

You need to post the file here or to another publicly available site so someone can look at it. To post it here, click Post Reply and look for the Attachments tab just below the box where you type a response. There is a file size limit of 128KB on this site.

[lynseyhumes]

wow thanks for the quick reply. The file is 88MB so too large to attach. Is there another way round it??

[floris v]

You can upload the file at for instance www.mediafire.com or another freehoster. Please don't use a site where you have to register before you can download anything.

[lynseyhumes]

https://www.mediafire.com/file/4zx3pdlh ... y.doc/file

[floris v]

Same error message here in AOO and LibreOffice. I hope that you have a back-up. You should really save files in the native format of the software that you make them with, especially when they are this size. Save documents made with MS Office in its own format, and documents made with OpenOffice in the ODF format to reduce chances of file corruption.

[FJCC]

I also tried opening the file in Word and it failed.

[JeJe]

Opening in Notepad - the file contents are still there. There are lots of suggestions online for recovering a corrupted doc file.

Word looks to have the "open and repair" and "Recover Text from Any File" commands if anyone is able to run that on it.

[lynseyhumes]

Ah ok is that it then?? No way to say even the text?? Thanks for trying guys

[JeJe]

As I said - there are lots of suggestions online for recovering a corrupted doc file. Including sites which will try and recover it (I have no ideal how good they might be) and the two suggestions using Word if you have access to it.

[floris v]

It's garbage, I'm afraid. I re-installed Lazarus a few days ago and thought I might as well extract all characters in the range [space] to 'z' and save that to a separate file. That gave some 300 MB junk characters. For good measure, I also made a small document with the default dummy text and save that as Word 1997-2003 (doc), then 'parsed' it with my program and that yielded:

Code: Select all

;

Root Entry

 !"$
FMicrosoft Word-Dokument
MSWordDocWord.Document.89q
[^^Normal1$*$A$3B*OJQJCJmHsHKHPJnHtH^JaJ_H9FFHeading
x$OJQJCJPJ^JaJ4B4Body Textd / List^J@""@Caption
xx$CJ6^JaJ]&2&Index$^JPGTimes New Roman5Symbol3&ArialiLiberation SerifTimes New RomanKNoto Serif CJK SCILohit DevanagariS&Liberation SansArialINoto Sans CJK SCILohit DevanagariBhKGKG##w 0 0Oh+'0HPdx

floris vfloris v1@%3@@%mC@o<C.+,D.+,\M 0Caolan80/bHe heard quiet steps behind him. That didn't bode well. Who could be following him this late at night and in this deadbeat part of town? And at this particular moment, just after he pulled off the big time and was making off with the greenbacks. Was there another crook who'd had the same idea, and was now watching him and waiting for a chance to grab the fruit of his labor? Or did the steps behind him mean that one of many law officers in town was on to him and just waiting to pounce and snap those cuffs on his wrists? He nervously looked all around. Suddenly he saw the alley. Like lightning he darted off to the left and disappeared between the two warehouses almost falling over the trash can lying in the middle of the sidewalk. He tried to nervously tap his way along in the inky darkness and suddenly stiffened: it was a dead-end, he would have to go back the way he had come. The steps got louder and louder, he saw the black outline of a figure coming around the corner. Is this the end of the line? he thought pressing himself back against the wall trying to make himself invisible in the dark, was all that planning and energy wasted? He was dripping with sweat now, cold and wet, he could smell the fear coming off his clothes. Suddenly next to him, with a barely noticeable squeak, a door swung quietly to and fro in the night's breeze. Could this be the haven he'd prayed for? Slowly he slid toward the door, pressing himself more and more into the wall, into the dark, away from his enemy. Would this door save his hide?


$a$A$-<0@PBP. A!n"n#n$n3P(20Root EntryF@CompObjjOle
1TableSummaryInformation(WordDocument/DocumentSummaryInformation8#t

I couldn't find anything like that in your document. Of course, if it wasn't written in the Latin alphabet, that doesn't mean anything.

[keme]

I opened the file in Windows notepad, forcing text interpretation to UTF16 big-endian, which seems to yield the largest textual part from the initial file storage blocks. Still, much of the file is rendered as Chinese characters (I think). I assume that those sections are image data (which Notepad of course forces into character interpretation).

Not sure that the Notepad app of Windows Vista (if that is really what you still have) offers this forced character interpretation. I may be able to send you the salvaged text portions if you are interested.

My Notepad is now "not responding" while interpreting/rendering your file. I'm leaving it to run overnight. Off to do some real work now

[Bill]

I could only open the file with hex editors in Linux. I was able to extract the text from the doc file using the "strings" command and sent the text to lynseyhumes via PM.