Machine code on my portable disc drive

[derrick]

All my microsoft word files I saved last year onto my portable disc drive now
read as machine code. I could read them when I saved them but when I looked
at them a few months ago , they were all in machine code. are they
salvegeable.

 

[Mike Hall - MVP]

All my microsoft word files I saved last year onto my portable disc drive
now
read as machine code. I could read them when I saved them but when I
looked
at them a few months ago , they were all in machine code. are they
salvegeable.

Ensure that the files are associated with MS Word. Sometimes, if you try to
open them with a competing product, the contents show huge amounts of
document formatting information, making it difficult to find recognizable
text..

If the above doesn't work, you may have lost them. BTW, it is always a good
idea to make two backups to different places.

What has happened to you shows the fragility of backing up. One can't even
assume that a backup will be any good until the time comes to retrieve the
stuff..

 

[shakey]

Your comment "What has happened to you shows the fragility of backing up.
One can't even

assume that a backup will be any good until the time comes to retrieve the
stuff.." is so unfortunately true. I religiously made external drive full
backups using Ghost 9 but when I went to restore system after a C reformat
It informed me that the files were on C drive and it couldn't restore C to
C. No trace of me G drive found even though that's where the files it
located on C really were..

There seems to be no guarantee that things will work until its too late. OH
yes I previously verified before reformat of C that I could restore files
from Ghost backup drive.
SG

 

[Richard]

All my microsoft word files I saved last year onto my portable disc drive
now
read as machine code. I could read them when I saved them but when I
looked
at them a few months ago , they were all in machine code. are they
salvegeable.

(Why the "few months" delay in seeking help?

How are you trying to "read" them? in the same program from which you saved
them? Did you save them from Microsoft Word directly to the portable drive,
or transfer/copy them from a folder on your hard drive? What version of
Word? Did you save them in one of the new file formats like DOCX or DOCM,
rather than DOC? The new versions are ZIP compressed, and unreadable in
older versions of Word. Try opening one of the files with NotePad and see if
the first two characters are "PK", indicating it is a ZIP file. If what you
are calling "machine code" actually is machine code, that is, executable
program code, then you need to consider the possibility that a virus or
other malware has written its own code into the files.

FWIW. --Richard