Week before Christmas accidentally used Quick Format on my External Hard Drive (F:) instead of the USB Memory Stick on (E:). Bought Unformat online and managed to retrieve everything - I thought. Reformatted, partitioned and split the external drive into two and set one part up to use as a file store and the other for daily back-ups. Then I went away for Christmas and when I got back went to open a Microsoft Office Word 2010 document and got the following message:
"The file name.docx cannot be opened because there are problems with the contents."
When I click "Details" I get the following error message:
"The file is corrupt and cannot be opened."
"Word found unreadable content in name.docx. Do you want to recover the contents of this document? If you trust the source of this document, click yes."
"The file name.docx cannot be opened because there are problems with the contents."
When I click "Details" I get the following error message:
"Microsoft Office cannot open this file because some parts are missing or invalid."
Unfortunately the 50 ish files in the 6 or so directories contain my life's work!
Over the last four days, I have tried various recovery programs to get other versions of the files back - but nothing.
Then tried various ways to extract the text from the files that I have. Again nothing except sometimes a lot of meaningless symbols, except in one case where I retrieved a string of unconnected words in English that I did not write!
In a few of the files, strangely, there was only whole word there, which was "KINDLE".
Tried "Open and Repair" and "Recover Text From Any File " options from within Word. Nothing.
Was advised to install Foxit Reader and try to open the files with it, but that did not work.
Also installed OpenOffice but could not retrieve any text that way either.
Perhaps most depressing was the message from Paul Pruitts "Corrupt DOCX Salvager" program saying:
"The word\document .xml file. which contains all the text within the .docx file,is either missing from the xml collection within the docx file or is empty. Sorry there is no text to recover."
Might have cried at that nice apologetic message if I was not in a sort of frozen numb state, focused on recovering these files and avoiding thinking about how my life will be if I cannot get "my babies" back!
Sometimes Word / Open Office ask me what "ASCII Filter Options" to use, out of dozens available from a drop down box containing options such as Western Europe (ISO-8859-15/EURO) or Unicode etc Have tried lots but maybe I am just trying the wrong ones? Can anyone advise which one to select?
So there do seem to still be some possibilities? Some hope? Have read that .docx files are based on .zip or have .xml files embedded.attached or something and that using code others have written to extract and "Parse", whatever that is etc? Unfortunately all this is beyond me and my above average but limited knowledge of computers and I desperately need the help of experts.
PLEASE HELP!
Edited by Tavia66, 31 December 2015 - 08:46 PM.