Microsoft Word 2002 Lost Documents

  • Thread starter Thread starter Karen Luce
  • Start date Start date
K

Karen Luce

For about 3 months I have been losing documents. I type
medical records and save them to a folder on the hard
drive and I burn a copy to a CD and we have been doing
this several years now. But recently when trying to access
the document from the CD I get a file permission error.
And when I try to get the document from the hard drive I
get the same message. I have been on the phone a total of
6 hours with Dell and they can't fix it. Can anyone please
help me.
 
When you burn files to CD, they end up marked at Read Only. Compounding the
problem, the entire CD likely is read-only, so Word is unable to create temp
files in its favorite location -- the folder where the file resides.

When you copy the file to your hard drive, the read-only attribute is still
set. So, you need to use Windows Explorer to turn off the Read Only setting.

Note: for just about any removable media (but expecially floppies), you
should never open the file directly on the removable media using Word. It's
a great shortcut to file corruption, precisely because of the way Word
creates temp files. So, it's always much safer to copy the file(s) to your
hard drive, make sure they're not write-protected, and then open them using
Word. When saving... do the same thing, in reverse. Close the file in Word,
then use Windows Explorer to copy it to the floppy or other removable media.
Don't use Word to save the file directly to removable media... especially
not if you want the file to be usable at a later date! ;-)
 
The files are not read-only. I was told by Dell that it
was a software application problem. They had me uninstall
and reinstall 3 different times and nothing works. I saw
on a previous comment on this forum to install a hotfix
832890 but I can't figure out how to do that.

Karen
 
The issue, as already posted, is almost certainly attributable to your use
of the CD. Word and removable media do not mix for reasons Herb has
explained.

Copy the document to the hard drive and ONLY open and save it there. Use the
CD only for the purpose of transportation. Check the file attribute after
copying to the hard drive.

It is not a software application problem. Dell is wrong. They also wasted
your time with re-installing - even once. Three times was ridiculous. You
were no doubt put through to a call centre in some far flung corner of the
world, where the support staff work from a script. If the problem is not on
the script you get the mantra to re-install things - and they call this
service :(

Re-installing rarely does anything useful as it makes no changes whatsoever
to user configuration files or the user configuration in the registry.

You may also need to clear up any temporary files created by this debacle.
Checkout http://www.gmayor.com/what_to_do_when_word_crashes.htm which
illustrates the files that you need to delete.

--
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Graham Mayor - Word MVP

My web site www.gmayor.com

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