decoding mirosoft word documents

I recovered a bunch of deleted filess on my laptop and i cant read the documents, they all look like gibberish. for example:

àP àH √äD$ ãL$ à √ã

is a part of one document.I cant figure it out.none of the encoding langueges seem to work. not sure what to do...

can sum1 PLEASE help me!!??????

:confused

 

Pareto logic,y is it important?:confused

 

OMG!! THATS DA CODE FOR DA WORSE COMP VIRUS IN DA WORLDS!








no but seriously it could be old log files that had be written over many times or other docs.
it can happen from time to time.

:major:major:major

 

nahh...nuthin to do wit viruses..just ALOT to do with file conversion!might be sumthing t do with rich txt format,i just cant seem to figure out how to open it,beacuse the computer has changed since these documents were sreated and deleted.rolleyes

 

in order to open a MS word document properly, you should be able to open DOC files with wordpad in XP to view a simple word document, if the file is currupt, you might have trouble recovering anything....

 

Word pad?thank u SO much i hope its that simple.il try now n let u know! :cool

 

dosnt seem to be working,stil looks like chinese to me...it's REALLY important that i find out what these documents said...not worth $ now, but could mean the difference in losin a company that would eventually be worth millions....

PLEASE sum1 help me....

im open to ideas.....thers not sum sort of decoder i could download?

PLEASE>>>

 

No, to open office documents ending in .doc you need word, or open office. Wordpad and notepad may sometimes reveal some text, but generaly can't handle the extra format information word adds to a .doc

 

i have word, it opens the document but it lookslike gibberish...im half afraid it was encrypted,but thinking it has more to do with how the document was saved,and the version of word the former user of the laptop used.

:hammer

 

How old is the laptop. There were other wordprocessors out there, but word seems to be a standard.

 

its not that old..the document was created last year and the laptop is 2005

 

Is the extension a .doc then or something different.

 

.rts

 

Everything i google with .rts seems to be a realplayer or quicktime media file, not an actual document.

 

oops....sry...shoulda been more careful...rtf is what i meant....too busy...eeek...sry again

 

Ok yea thats right then .rtf should be wordpad or word with no problems. Thats about as much help as i can offer at the moment.

 

Many times when files are deleted and then recovered, the recovered files aren't usable because the file was.... well.... it was deleted. When Windows deletes a file it does so with the intention of getting rid of it. Completely. Windows doesn't say to itself (if it could do such a thing) "hmmm... she deleted this file but she might need it later or maybe it was an accident so I'll just keep it over here in its entirety so it can be recovered later". All files have a "header" that tells the OS what follows and where to find it on the hard drive. When a file is deleted, this header is changed or removed so the OS sees the blank header or the changed header and knows that the space on the drive that follows is free to be written on. Data recovery programs try to find and rebuild these headers by looking at the leftover info on the drive and logically rebuilding the file from what is left. If some new data has been written to any part of the space where the file was, it may be corrupted upon recovery. Then there's fragmentation. A single file may not be all in one cohesive block on the drive. Part if it might be here, some over there, and more of it is further over there. When it's deleted and new data is written to the drive, it may be written partially to just part of one of the sections previously occupied by a file you want to recover. Therefore the recovered file is corrupt, or missing pieces, or is in "Chinese"....

 

So how do i go about fixing this problem,and viewing the documnet(s) in entirety??

 

Well, I'm kind of going in a different direction. But did you try the "Detect and Repair" option under the "Help" menu when you have the document open? This is assuming your version of Word has it. :confused
Which version of Microsoft Office are you using?

 

I have the 2007 version,and it dosnt seem to have it...
:cry

 

Well, this is kinda of late, as I was searching for something else in my PDA and came across this.

Open up Word.
On the File Menu, click Open.
In the LOOK IN list, click the drive, folder, or Internet location that contains the file that you want to open.

In the folder list, locate and open the folder that contains the file.
Select the file that you want to recover. NOTE, select it, but do not open it.

Click the arrow next to the Open button, and then click Open And Repair.

 

Thank you so much for your considerate help,but your suggestion never worked.there are only 2 or 3 sentances per page and looks like this:

9 9 9 9$9*90969<9B9H9N9T9Z9`9f9l9r9x9~9„9Š99–9œ9¢9¨9®9´9º9À9Æ9Ì9Ò9Ø9Þ9ä9ê9ð9ö9ü9 : :

is it possible that the document was encrypted?and is it possible to decrypt?where would i find suh a program?