[SOLVED] Corrupt Word Document / Possible to recover?

[teh'p3nsi0n3r]

Ok so I am kind of posting this in desperation lol. :)
My mother has been writing/typing a very important document/book about Multiple Sclerosis and it is largely based around a personal family members own experiences who has the illness.

She has been saving her work constantly and made backups but just yesterday the work she was writing she lost.
Microsoft Word decided to bomb out with an error as she was saving.
The Recovery tool did not recover the file proparly, instead she has been left with a very large amount of content (parts being her writing) and the rest in garbled text.

She uses word 2002 because shes not the most experienced of computer users and uses what she is used to. :)
I have suggested Open Office, and has tried it (fair game) but went back to what she was used to.

I have tried 3rd party recovery programs that claim to recover damaged Word documents, but still get the same resolve.
Do any of you know what I can do? or is she going to have to start over?, so far she claims to have lost around 10 pages (6 hours) of writing.
The document is around 93kbs and the garbled text spat out around 38 pages when opened in word.

I have tried the recover options within word including the open dialog and "extract text from file" option.
I have also have been googling for 2 hours before I thought of of posting here.
Has anyone had any similar situations? and how did you go about recovering your corrputed data?.

All help is apreciated. :)

ps. I hope this is correct part for posting this type of thread, if not feel free to move to the appropriate section.

[smoker]

forgive me if you've tried this, but try opening the document in a basic text editor like 'notepad', if it works you should have the text but lose the formatting, which can always be redone,

best of luck

[teh'p3nsi0n3r]

Hey, thanks for the quick reply, yea this is one of the options I tried originally. I have attached a screenshot of what the content looks like in notepad, there is some words/content that seems ok but this shows in word also, but the rest of the content is still garbled like in the screen grab attached.
I am currently downloading openoffice to try that instead to open the document, this is the only thing I can think of that may work. :confused: anymore ideas?

Thanks for your help. :)

EDIT: I have downloaded openoffice (latest version) still the same, shows garble, does this mean I am out of luck?

[mips]

If word is setup correctly there should be a backup file on the HD if Im not mistaken.

Alternatively you can try and do a file recovery on a older version if you can find it on the HD and if it has not bee overwritten yet.

[chungy]

1. Microsoft Word explodes at large documents. It's really common knowledge among anyone that's ever tried to write a thesis in it.
2. Try seeing if OpenOffice.org can open it. You mentioned you tried showing your mom it, but you neglected to say if it was before or after this incident.

[smoker]

as mips stated above, you may have a backup copy of the file on your hard drive,
have a look for files ending in .wbk, or .tmp, or files starting with a ~

with luck you may find a workable copy somewhere on the drive.

only other thing i can think of is try a linux text editor like 'gedit' on the ubuntu live-cd, not sure if it will be any improvement over 'notepad' though, but maybe worth a go...

best of luck

[teh'p3nsi0n3r]

Hi all thanks for everyones replys, my mum managed to redo all of her work so everything is ok now, thanks for everyones help, marked thread as solved.