Odd issues recovering a document

[Dreamstalker]

So I've been combing through some old hard drives and found some ancient fanfic-related stuff. Some of which may be salvageable, most was along the lines of "WTF was I on when I wrote this?!" and deleted (I have a box full of similar paper someone gave me that's under the bed--the stuff's at least 20 years old and I'm almost afraid to look through it)

All the files were created with Corel Wordperfect (.wpd), and while OpenOffice 4 was unable to open them I downgraded to 3.1 and am saving them as .doc files, then I'll 'upgrade' OO again when this is all done. Was going fine until I came across one file.

When I try to open this one, I get an ASCII Filter dialog box; any 'seems obvious' selection results in a 672-page document with 2-5 lines of complete gibberish per page and no actual words that I can detect. Properties are nothing useful; the file was created in 2002, but I've been able to open older documents with no problem.

Any ideas? I've tried renaming it to .doc, opening it with Wordpad (result was even worse)...nothing. This thing isn't critical to anything, I'm just curious what's in it (and fiddling with it would be good practice). Google-fu has failed me for some reason.

[CyberLurch]

It sounds like the file may be password-encrypted.

It may also be corrupted.

[Ironclad Alibi]

Is it safe to assume the file has the .wpd extension? I always use Notepad to look at unknown files. I also have a hex edit program that is sometimes useful.

You could try comparing the file header (first few lines) to a known file to see if they compare.

It might be an embedded picture in the document that is giving all the garbage.

[cindybubbles]

Can we see a screenshot of the opened file in Notepad, please?

[Dreamstalker]

OK, here's the file in Notepad.



The filesize is 158kb (size on disk 160k), and I'm pretty sure it's not encrypted (nothing else on that drive was that I know of). The original drive was from a laptop with XP Home if that's relevant.

ETA: I double-checked the file permissions (on the offchance I missed something), but there's nothing there--I have full permissions for that and all the other files I copied.

[cindybubbles]

Here are five ways to see that file. Let us know if any one way works:

http://junesjournal.com/4-ways-to-op...-a-windows-pc/

If none of these work, the file is probably encrypted.