Corrupt Word Docs - cannot open

Question

I have spent that last 2 days reading the posts here and various online, whitepapers, and recovery docs from "leading" software / document recovery tools. Nothing is working but I still do not believe all is lost. Yes, my bad for not having a
backup - that aside...
I had a workstation at my office that got infected. The employee was saving her Word 2010 docx's to her "My documents" folder instead of the "data drive". A "g-squad" type person came out, told me it could not be disinfected so
he wiped the system and reloaded Win7. Not sure how he "wiped" it but I imagine he just deleted the partition on Win7 reload. I freaked when I saw he didnt backup the docs in the my doc folder before he reloaded, and he told me that was MY fault
for not backing up...
He popped in a CD and
said he was able to "find" the "digital image" of the docs on the harddrive. A few minutes later I had the Word file icons back on the desktop. I tried to open the docs and got the error: "...cannot be opened because there
are problems with the contents" and "The file is corrupt and cannot be opened"
He looked at me, told me that was the best he could do, charged me $400 for his troubles and left. Last time I EVER - EVER use the "squad"...
I have tried:
opening as a TXT
sending to GMAIL and trying recovery
tried "open/repair" option in Word
importing into many "web-based" html/xml processors
many other attempts
So I have spent the last couple of days looking at MANY options. The best I can do is open the doc but I get a page of ASCII characters. Data recovery specialists in this city charge a LOT of money to do this, and I am pretty darn sure I can do the same as
long as I had the proper tools. I have looked at a LOT of software but haven't purchased any yet. I have read MANY MANY posts here on EE, and have looked at many of those packages, way too many to list here but lets just say at least the top 20 "recommended"
packages. They all say the same thing about recovering from NTFS, rebuilding the headers, etc, etc. but they all seem "consumer" in quality.
Is purchasing a "recovery" software my ONLY choice?
Are there any professional freeware tools I can add to my software tool kit? Years (MANY years) ago, I used to have a software that would display the digital bit mapping of the drive and "rebuild" the software files. Of course, this was back in Win95
days...
I appreciate and value the advice and recommendations from EE. Thank you

Answer 1

Hi,
Before you start purchasing recovery software try this last option. You can make a copy of the file right?
First make a copy because you will be making changes to the document.
Now in the Windows Explorer rename the file by adding .zip after the filename. Confirm that you want to rename this. Now double click the file in the windows explorer (the zip container). You will see the cornerstones of this document in several folders.
Now every folder has it's specific use for specific elements for this document such as document properties, pictures etc. You can open the various files in the various folders and see the contents of that file.
Now for testing you can remove one of the files in the first folder and try opening the document again after you removed the .zip from the filename again. I know a lot of work but if you try the various folders or different files in those folders you might
just be able to 'save' the document.
Maurice
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