Many old documents show unreadable chars when opened in Office 200

[Guest]

I have saved my documents on a CD-RW for a few years now. The CD is fine
because certain documents open up OK. However, several other older documents
when opened (which was always fine before) show nothing by unreadable
characters. This has happened to many .docs. I am using Office 2000
Professional and have been using this for years now and I am still using this
to open the documents. What is causing this and have I lost access to these
files? I have copied them to my hard drive and removed the read only bit but
it still opens the files as a text file with unreadable characters (I have
tried opening the file with the other options available eg. rich text etc to
no avail). I have use the latest antivirus software to scan the disc and it
is OK. Any help appreciated.

 

[Graham Mayor]

Never ever read from, write to or print from removable media with Word. This
is the most certain method of ensuring document corruption. Always copy to
the hard disc and work on the document from there. The probability is that
you have opened these documents and then on closing, the associated
temporary files have been lost, corrupting the document.

Furthermore, if you have been using the disc as a 'big floppy', you should
note that this is the least stable way of using CD media and is best avoided
for anything important. Use ISO multisessions written by your CD mastering
software instead.

I would copy all the files from this disc and then ascertain which will
still open, then back those up using the method suggested. The others I fear
are lost.

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Graham Mayor - Word MVP

My web site www.gmayor.com

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