urgent corrupt Word docx .need help

Hi all,

I am you will say how silly I was… and yes i was i did not save a spare copy of my thesis and now the only file i have cannot be opened!!!

I assume the problem came from endnotes when i closed the word document. somehow the endnotes library corrupted and cause an error for word 07 as well. Now when i try to open the docx (word 2007) document, a message comes up saying the the context of file is missing and cannot be opened. I tried different word recovery softeware and none of them work!!!

i wonder if anyone has the same experience and if so how can i open the word document (or extract some of the text at least) when the endnotes context is corrupt.

Many thanks in adanve!!

what do you see if you try to open it in a text only program (wordpad, maybe notepad, but it might be too big for that). 

I would be calling tech support if you really think Endnote trashed it.

it tried the notepad, it either shows blank page or strange character code

My suggestions:

Do not write any files using the computer that has your corrupted file. That includes web browsing, e-mail, everything. If you keep using the hard drive, data recovery by professionals will be more difficult.

Check the file size (has it changed?). Copy the corrupted file to flash drive, and try to open by Word in a different computer. Try Mac Word, Different Word versions, Wordpad, everything (have you?). But do them using “backup” file (even it is corrupted).

Look for any flash drive, or portable hard drive for a remnant of the previous versions (binary editor or data recovery software sometime helps to find out these remnants).

Consider dedicated data recovery software (I have used Nucleus Kernel Recovery tools, but they didn’t work for me. It may work for you.), or find out friends who can use binary editors (read binary data directly from hard drive).

Consider professional data recovery service (they are really expensive: sometime >$5K).

Start re-writing (and build back up routine and habit ASAP).