Question : How To Recover Encrypted / Corrupted Word Documents

I found some old word documents that I found from an old hard drive. You'll be surprised the cool things you can recover from old storage units.

Anyway.... I'm trying to open up these word documents but I'm having no such luck.

I'm being asked to select an encoding method.  File Conversion. In the preview box, everything looks like junk. It doesn't seem like the word files are password protected. No password box is coming up. Just won't show any readable information; but you can see data exist.

How can these files be recovered. Is that any software I should use?

Maybe this can help: These documents came from an operating system partition. What I mean is that I got them from c:\documents and settings\user\my documents. I know XP has a method to not allow access to files for specific users. If you select this option; other users wont be able to access the files in Windows. So, I'm thinking that Windows might have encrypted the files and now they are unreadable even when moved to a new machine.

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

Answer : How To Recover Encrypted / Corrupted Word Documents

If an encryption method has been used (including EFS encryption built into windows), then the chances of recovery are minimal - afrer alll encryption would be prettu useless if you could circumvent it easily. There is a tool at http://www.elcomsoft.com/aefsdr.html that claims to recover encrypted files - but I've no idea if it works or how long it takes to recover al file.