Word Document Recovery

[Sue B]

I lost the entire contents of the My Documents folder when my system admin changed my login domain. Not sure why because the folder was on my hard drive, but whatever.

I ran System Mechanic 5 Professional and recovered most of them. My admin also installed Office 2003, upgrading from 2000. OS is XP.

I recovered the documents to a server instead of to my hard drive. The jpg, pdf, and gif files are fine, but the doc and xls files are not. When I try to open them, some work, but most look like code.

I've tried opening a new file and inserting the old file, copying and pasting into a new file being sure not to copy the final return, saving as an rtf. Nothing works. I tried Word's "recover text from any file" feature. Nada. I downloaded the demo version of Office Recovery's "Word Recovery" program, but then I just get a file with the word "demo" where the boxes were.

Any ideas?

 

[Anne Troy]

Yes, your sysadmin needs to move the files from your old user to your new user accounts... I don't really know anything about it 'cause I'm not on a network but definitely one of the symptoms opening files of "another user" is gobbledygook.

 

[Sue B]

Yes, your sysadmin needs to move the files from your old user to your new user accounts... I don't really know anything about it 'cause I'm not on a network but definitely one of the symptoms opening files of "another user" is gobbledygook.

Well, he did, or at least we thought he did. He did it on Friday before I left early. On Monday, we discovered that the folders moved, but the files were gone. The recovery program showed them as having been deleted. I guess that's what I get for taking off early!

A little more info that may or may not help: The files are showing up with the correct file extensions and the file sizes seem accurate as well.