I have saved my documents on a CD-RW for a few years now. The CD is fine
because certain documents open up OK. However, several other older documents
when opened (which was always fine before) show nothing by unreadable
characters. This has happened to many .docs. I am using Office 2000
Professional and have been using this for years now and I am still using this
to open the documents. What is causing this and have I lost access to these
files? I have copied them to my hard drive and removed the read only bit but
it still opens the files as a text file with unreadable characters (I have
tried opening the file with the other options available eg. rich text etc to
no avail). I have use the latest antivirus software to scan the disc and it
is OK. Any help appreciated.

Never ever read from, write to or print from removable media with Word. This
is the most certain method of ensuring document corruption. Always copy to
the hard disc and work on the document from there. The probability is that
you have opened these documents and then on closing, the associated
temporary files have been lost, corrupting the document.

Furthermore, if you have been using the disc as a 'big floppy', you should
note that this is the least stable way of using CD media and is best avoided
for anything important. Use ISO multisessions written by your CD mastering
software instead.

I would copy all the files from this disc and then ascertain which will
still open, then back those up using the method suggested. The others I fear
are lost.

--

Graham Mayor - Word MVP

My web site www.gmayor.com
Word MVP web site http://word.mvps.org





Misty wrote:
I have saved my documents on a CD-RW for a few years now. The CD is
fine because certain documents open up OK. However, several other
older documents when opened (which was always fine before) show
nothing by unreadable characters. This has happened to many .docs.
I am using Office 2000 Professional and have been using this for
years now and I am still using this to open the documents. What is
causing this and have I lost access to these files? I have copied
them to my hard drive and removed the read only bit but it still
opens the files as a text file with unreadable characters (I have
tried opening the file with the other options available eg. rich text
etc to no avail). I have use the latest antivirus software to scan
the disc and it is OK. Any help appreciated.