You may not be able to "recover" the file in the sense of having all the text
and its formatting intact, but you can probably pull out all the text.
First make a copy of the document file to work on, on your hard drive (_not_ on
the thumbdrive). Put the original aside for safekeeping.
Rename the copy with a .zip extension (this works because Word 2007 format
documents really are zip files). Open the resulting zip file, which contains a
series of folders that contain other files.
In the \word folder you'll find a file named document.xml. Make a copy of that
file outside the zip container. Double-click it to open it (by default Windows
usually wants to open .xml files in Internet Explorer, which is OK). If IE
refuses to open it because of an error in the XML, right-click the file and
choose Open With > Notepad.
There will be a lot of XML coding, but the plain text will be there between tags
<w:t> and <\w:t>. You can copy/paste the text to a new document and reformat it.
In general, _never_ edit any Word document while it's on a thumbdrive or any
other removable media. It's simply an invitation to document corruption. Always
work on the documents on the hard drive and then copy the file to the thumbdrive
for transport or backup.
--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP
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