Corrupt Word documents

grumpycrab

Evening.  A friend has got a handful of corrupt Word documents (they used a memory stick as master location.  Don't say anything).  No backup and  Word.backup == Disabled (I don't understand why the latest version of Word disables file backup by default).  I've tried "recover text from corrupt document"  but nothing.  I think these docs are unrecoverable.  Unless anybody knows different?

WaywardDriver

Open a document after a file corruption error - Office Support (microsoft.com)

John_Gray

I've occasionally found that a Word document to which Word objects can be opened in Wordpad.

In the Search box at bottom-left of the screen, enter Wordpad and double click on it when it appears as the "Best match App".

ann_droid

Hi
OPENOFFICE, preferably an early version is what I would try, after Piriform Recuva has had a go.

arciere

Corrupt document on a USB drive is 99% of the time an indication of a failed USB drive. In which case the probability of recovering it is pretty much 0.

grumpycrab

Thanks - looks like failing USB drive (or connector.)  All documents copied off the USB and I told friend that if anything was critical it shouldn't be used until a data recovery company had a go (costing lots).  They didn't want to go that route so I've got the original media to look at...
At first I thought we were looking at a fake USB - haven't seen one of those for ages (cheap looking no name brand claiming 64GB).  Took a number of goes to get chkdsk to run to completion and only worked in a desktop computer.  Now also running hwdisk (its filling up the USB as we speak) and so think there's a bad connection between connector and internal circuitry. Most Word documents updated/created since  28th Jan are corrupted.  Moral of story. Never use a memory stick as master data repository.

WaywardDriver

Is the memory stick corrupt or only some Word docs? If latter then have you tried my earlier suggestion which mentions corruption due to disconnecting memory stick before Word has finished writing to it?

grumpycrab

WaywardDriver said:

Is the memory stick corrupt or only some Word docs? 

Both. I tried the word "open and repair" in your microsoft link. No luck.  Looks like a bad connector in the USB (chkdsk and hwdisk both ran to complettion on a desktop computer). As arciere said I'd give a data recovery company 0 chance of recovering and text from the 200-odd corrupt word documents. 

mgfvvc

The modern docx format is XML inside a zip archive. If you have access to Linux, try 'zip -FF' to see if that can extract any of the contents. I wouldn't expect it to retrieve anything, but it can't hurt to try.

alanclarke

Just seen this on BetaNews.com, DataNumen Word Repair - https://www.datanumen.com/word-repair/

iampetesmith

mgfvvc said:

The modern docx format is XML inside a zip archive. If you have access to Linux, try 'zip -FF' to see if that can extract any of the contents. I wouldn't expect it to retrieve anything, but it can't hurt to try.

Or 7-zip if you're on Windows. Once that's installed, you can right-click an Office document and the option to extract should be in the menu. If it extracts, you can go in the folders and look at the text & images. If it'd corrupt and won't extract, I'd say it's lost.