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I cannot open any of the DOC files recovered by PhotoRec. I tried a bunch of tools to open them - Word, Wordpad, OpenOffice, some picture viewers, WinZip, Freefileviewer etc.. - all with no luck.

Wordpad shows a bunch of pages with a lot of characters but no text of any kind that I could use to decipher what the file may consist of. One thing I note is that when I open the document, it shuts down my browser (Firefox) and I cannot figure out why.

Can anybody help me with this? May be these documents are not DOC files and PhotoRec improperly assigned them as such. One thing to note is that I did not have Word on my crashed system so all doc files were created using OpenOffice (as ODT).

The start of one of the files in Wordpad looks like this:

םX,¶¢MJ8ÕŽì0aœƒ]Ø,ê>~‡>#
ZnÎ~ÏFºEy猠ÚH'Ö­Ü_Gi¦4g’À}éZ:Ö«=Ô!X*&:/zäo䐡ï)éí^J
’9©ãå-44¯êÈ°‰_ËVÈPp+¯²ñ¦¬ÚéVÌè²dncЃ^w§Â^U»
Ý›·ÏO =…[RÖlÔÑ-0¢÷Ï­t–ôÏj«¥Úü c5ÞøGÁº¦±* dŒõv­3û:‘êe—SS¯Ï-–¦6•¦M{ †šIðWªø3á‹9K­\àu
î<àÍ;AJF$¸#摇5Õ"€8¯µg]Uí*9È©¥i¶º}ºÁk
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Thanks very much for any pointers.

Hi, This is OP with an update on my situation.

I used a SW called 'RecoveryFix for Word' and repaired some of the DOC files. I now see the contents of the DOC files but what is strange is that these docs are just pages with some of the jpeg pictures in the recovered folder inserted.

I don't understand why PhotoRec created these files because clearly they did not exist in the original failed hard drive. The jpegs themselves have been recovered correctly.

Can someone explain what is going on here?

Regards.

The file were existing before but were probably Thumbs.db file. As Microsoft uses the same format than for Word documents, you may have those false positive.