Microsoft Word Document Corrupted - Help!

My niece is doing a school paper and saved a file to the thumb drive. Now when you pull it up, it is all garbled text. Can anyone look at it and let me know if there is a way to salvage it!?

Here is the file:

http://www.notebooknerd.com/temp/irpjournal.7z

 

Corrupted memory on the flash drive.
All you're doing is giving us a copy of the corruption, so it's not possible to get anything out of that. Your best bet would be to keep the flash drive very cold and try to read the data off of it again.
I've said it before and I'll say it again, flash drives are not long term storage, or even short term. They're simply a form of transportation for documents.

 

I get squat even with a hex editor

 

would this file happen to be made in open office then saved as a microsoft word document?

 

I know I know of 3 people at my university who had the exact same problem (one being me) with in a 2 day time span. all using different flash drives, but on the same 2 computers... the Tec's there think it's a virus. I really don't know. all I know is it made my final exam twice as long...

tell her to start rewritting it. thats all that you can do. by the way save to the hard drive and then copy to the flash drive when your done. that's the safest way.

good luck

 

Ok. I've done a little snooping around in the file, and this is what I have done so far.

1. I extracted the file that you requested and decided to open it up in Word myself.

2. Yes. It is all garbled and everything.

3. I noticed the first two bytes of the file header had "PK" in it. This seemed absolutely strangely familiar to me. This means that the file is actually just zipped.

4. I changed the extension on the document from .doc to .zip and extracted the compressed files.

5. For comparison, I decided to open a .doc and .docx in Notepad. The .docx seems to be in the same format as the file you sent me, so I changed the extensions on your file, but I still got garbled text.

6. I looked into the test .docx as a zip in PowerArchiver and your file as a zip in PowerArchiver, compared them, and interestingly the whole "word/" directory and "document.xml" is missing in your file meaning that we have no way to retrieve the data that you are requesting.

Good luck.

 

I think it is interesting to note that docx is just a bunch of xml files and a few other files just zipped together. So if you want to go exploring in your docx file, just change the extension to .zip.

Have fun. lol

 

She was typing it at school, put it on her flash drive to do at home, and this is what she go. Thanks guys, I changed extension to .zip and looks like it's just xml stuff, no document. Guess I'll deliver the bad news.

 

Did your neice "safely remove" the flashdrive or did she pulled it out while the file is saving?
Also... office 2007 files are all based on XML. That's how they can get everything is smaller size compared to earlier office versions and still have more features included in the document file.

 

Yes it was office 2007. Both at school and home. Does this mean there's still hope? I didn't see anything though that looked like a document.

 

How many words approximately does this document have? So far, I've recovered about 800 words. I'll keep on trying though..

Edit.. this is hopeless... I can only get a bunch of broken XML codes. If anyone can figure this out, here's to code that I recovered.

 

Thanks for your assistance. I don't know how much effort she put into this so far, but will tell her to start retrying, and make sure to make a save in two locations.

 

I guess no one wants to face this for what it is.
The data isn't recoverable, it was lost when the flash memory cell became corrupted.
I looked through what's left of the document, and was able to get quite a bit more than that's posted above... but the actual content is gone/destroyed. The only things still readable are heading information, font info, other formatting data... nothing of value.

IT'S GONE. In fact, if someone can retrieve 90% or more of the original document, I will paypal them $20.

 

It's more likely that the person didn't finished saving the file before she yanked out the flashdrive.

 

Also possible, I guess only time will tell (for example if more stuff starts becoming corrupted).
Either way, the data is simply not there. There is no recovery.

 

Thanks again guys. I already told her to start retyping. I appreciate everyone's interest and help. I knew it would be a fun challenge for some!