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URGENT windows works file recovery

S

swingerofbirch

macrumors 68040
Original poster
Oct 24, 2003
3,687
4,681
The Amalgamated States of Central North America
Hi, While my eMac is in the shop (another long story I've told elsewhere here), I am using my work PC. I was working on a short story I had not yet saved in Microsoft Works Word Processor when it said it became unresponsive and had to close. I have been searching all over the computer for traces of this unsaved file.

Under C:/Windows/Prefetch there are files from around the time I lost the document and they are "PF" files. There is even one called WKSWP.EXE-25E36596 , which gives me hope it might be related to the file I was working on. When I open it in Notepad I get gobbly goop. Anyone have any ideas????? THanks!

I know this is a mac forum, but i wouldn't know where to go for windows support, and I assume some of the geniuses here use windows as well!!!!!
 
chance are it is lost for good because unless it was stored to the hard drive when the program crashed it was just in the ram or in the PF which are deleted when the program closest. I though word had an auto save funtition that would show you a recovered file if the program crashed or was shut down with out saving. Dont know abouts but I could swear MS works 95 did so I would assume that the current would 2. I know you could set how offen it would do it. I think the default is about every few mins it saves a back up copy to hard drive in case of a crash. have you tried just reopening up works and see if it detects a recovery file.

you may just be SOL and let this be a lesson to you. Always save every 20-30 mins or so on any computer incase of a crash, power outage or something else.
 
If the file exsists, I would imagine that it would be in the "Documents and Settings" folder. In this folder there are some hidden sub-folders that you should check out. That really sucks though, had you been using MS Office, you probably wouldn't be having this issue, since it autosaves for you...

(I'm assuming your running Windows 2000 or later)
 
You can chage the temp file to .doc or .txt.

Also, search the HD for not a file type for for actual content.

Search for a key word or exsact text phrase with in the computer.


This can sometimes help. I have this problem at work with my coworkers not saveing their work, or worse yet, over writing the data.

I will crash my MS word, after writing a unique phrase to see if I can find it. give me a bit.

Often M$ tempfiles have long strings of numbers in the header, with a .TMP end, but not always.
 
This did not work on my work station, so an XP machine may not be able to find the data this way. I know on my bosses 2k machine, and with his version of Word, this was possible.

I tried to replicate your problem, but didn't find a quick solution.

Sorry.

I opened up the C-prompt, and typed chkdsk \r to see if it can recover any clusters. It used to be in the days of DOS and early windows, that the only useful feature of the "Would you like to save found lost clusters?" feature was to search for lost text. Why did MS offer this, it wasn't like they offered a restore lost cluster feature.

I have to get back to work, so I may not be able to post as to what I found out today.

Also, likely the word processor that you used translated the file into a standard ASCii readable format, so changing the extension may not help. Most documents store their text as standard ASCii or Unicode characters with proprietary coding inter dispersed among, before and after text. So if the file is huge, you could search for a string of charcters with in the likely file, like a location or persons name.
 
Haha....yes you're right, it's not so urgent anymore...every once in a while I do a search of the forums by my user name to check up on threads I've posted in and this was at the top by date. I cannot recall at all what that short story was. I would have been taking a creative writing class back then. What may have been! :)

Thanks to everyone who offered their help!
 
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