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I have a damaged Word Document. Please help??

I have a damaged Word Document that was saved to a USB. It went from a size of 177kb to 4kb. The error: "Unexpected end of input. Location: Part: word/document.xml, Line: 2, column: 12679" Is there anything that can be done? Help??????

slubek

Modern Office (2007+) documents are zip archives. If the file size is only 4kb that means that only zip structures survived and there is no Word data in that file. The only way is to use some data recovery software to undelete previous file versions. Personally, I'm using photorec suite. It can recovery not only photos, but also another deleted files.
Good luck!

BC Rice

ASKER

So...would this program be able to find an older version of it on my USB? That is where the file exists. Thank you

slubek

Yes, it will find every recoverable file from your USB thumb. But during recovery don't write them to that USB drive as it will overwrite space occupied by your files (which is now marked as free) and make recovery impossible. Don't write anything on that drive before finishing recovery.

SOLUTION

alanccw

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BC Rice

ASKER

I used the photorec program and what it provided me was a bunch of Word files that once upon a time resided on the USB disk. That was pretty neat, but it didn't seem to address the issue. It didn't give me an older copy of the corrupted file.

BC Rice

ASKER

Alan: I tried using DataNumen. It looks like it's still only showing the file being 4kb in size. It is showing "dummy text", but only like 20 lines in total. The document is about 30,000 words. I'm hesitant to buy the full version just to look at 4kb of data as that obviously is not the document.

BC Rice

ASKER

Alan: Yeah, looking at the actual document that was "fixed", it's just a portion of the first page. That's cool that it could even do that...but that's not the entire document.

Anymore ideas? The WinWar one would be a route I could go...but that too would require me to pay for something that probably won't help.

Do you feel like DataNumen was like the apex of your suggestion? Like, they would be the absolute best chance of resolving the issue?

Like I said, they made that 4kb readable. But it didn't locate the rest of the file.

BC Rice

ASKER

Slubek -- I did the recovery...but it didn't even show me half of the *existing* Word documents currently on the USB. It gave me everything that had been previously deleted.

Should I perhaps move the damaged document OUT of the USB and then see if it feels the need to locate it inside the document? Would that make any sense?

I'm not understanding why it's only locating files that have been deleted and essentially ignoring existing files as being, ya know, present.

SOLUTION

slubek

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ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

Robert Retzer

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Frank Helk

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