Hi guys,
I was wondering if any of you could help me. I've just been given a failed drive by one of my housemates. The drive was inaccessible via Windows so I used testdisk and copied as much as I could.
Jpegs, txt and pdf documents are all fine but word documents are all corrupt. Whenever I've recovered lost or deleted data from machines I've ALWAYS had this problem. Everything but word documents recovers fine.
How can I restore a word document?
I've tried open and repair from word, office recovery and open office.
Thought I'd ask here to see if any of you can help? )
Are these .doc or .docx files?
What does testdisk do? Just it just recover files based on signature?
One problem with .doc files is that often become fragmented as they are saved after each edit
For .docx files, these can be processed as .zip files and extract the relevant section. Again, there can be a fragmentation problem, though it may be possible to reach the relevant XML section in a partial Zip file. This may require reconstruction of the end directory of the file.
I have tried developing automatic defragmenting of .doc files, but the success rate I achieved is typically very low. The problems I ran into is that there are often several versions of the same file - from different edits, and the fragments may not be in sequence. It can become a problem of a jigsaw puzzle with many almost identical pieces, and very similar colours. A false positive match is very likely.
The best solution I have normnally managed is to physically example a partial document and just extract the plain text. However, do be aware that the text saved sequentially in the file may have been edited, and the edited values are stored elsewhere. Any text recovered has to be treated a draft, and not a final copy. Forensically, this can be a significant issue, but for a friend, some data is probably far better than non.
Primarily .doc but there's a couple of .docx files.
Thanks for the info D
