I have spent that last 2 days reading the posts here and various online, whitepapers, and recovery docs from "leading" software / document recovery tools. Nothing is working but I still do not believe all is lost. Yes, my bad for not having a backup - that aside...

I had a workstation at my office that got infected. The employee was saving her Word 2010 docx's to her "My documents" folder instead of the "data drive". A "g-squad" type person came out, told me it could not be disinfected so he wiped the system and reloaded Win7. Not sure how he "wiped" it but I imagine he just deleted the partition on Win7 reload. I freaked when I saw he didnt backup the docs in the my doc folder before he reloaded, and he told me that was MY fault for not backing up...

He popped in a CD and said he was able to "find" the "digital image" of the docs on the harddrive. A few minutes later I had the Word file icons back on the desktop. I tried to open the docs and got the error: "...cannot be opened because there are problems with the contents" and "The file is corrupt and cannot be opened"

He looked at me, told me that was the best he could do, charged me $400 for his troubles and left. Last time I EVER - EVER use the "squad"...

I have tried:

opening as a TXT

sending to GMAIL and trying recovery

tried "open/repair" option in Word

importing into many "web-based" html/xml processors

many other attempts
So I have spent the last couple of days looking at MANY options. The best I can do is open the doc but I get a page of ASCII characters. Data recovery specialists in this city charge a LOT of money to do this, and I am pretty darn sure I can do the same as long as I had the proper tools. I have looked at a LOT of software but haven't purchased any yet. I have read MANY MANY posts here on EE, and have looked at many of those packages, way too many to list here but lets just say at least the top 20 "recommended" packages. They all say the same thing about recovering from NTFS, rebuilding the headers, etc, etc. but they all seem "consumer" in quality.

Is purchasing a "recovery" software my ONLY choice?

Are there any professional freeware tools I can add to my software tool kit? Years (MANY years) ago, I used to have a software that would display the digital bit mapping of the drive and "rebuild" the software files. Of course, this was back in Win95 days...

I appreciate and value the advice and recommendations from EE. Thank you

• Moved by Fei XueMicrosoft contingent staff Monday, April 20, 2015 1:59 AM

I would like to suggest you to use of Word Repair Toolbox is the best Microsoft Word file repair software that can be used on any computer without considering its configuration and technical skills of its users. For more: http://www.wordrepairtoolbox.com/

• Marked as answer by OliverHic 20 hours 39 minutes ago