Recover from or repair a corrupt password protected Word 2010 file

Question

I created a password-protected Word 2010 document at work, brought it home using a flash drive, tried opening it using Word 2007, and it won't open. It doesn't even present me with a password-entry box. Word runs, but flat out refuses to open the doc. I have the password, but what bloody good is it when I'm not presented with the password input dialogue?

OpenOffice Writer yields no joy, and WordPad tells me the document is either 'Corrupt or protected under Rights Management.' NotePad opens it quite willingly, and I see frequent references to 'encryption' that look coherent, with large blocks of text that did look so.

WinZip says the file is 'not a valid archive', which an unencrypted Word 2010 file should be a valid archive.

Is there anything I can do to recover this file?

Answer 1

You would first need to verify if the document in question is open protected (the password is only needed to open the document) or if the document is encrypted (which means the password is used to decrypt the document).

If it is the first then you may still be able to get the content extracted by recovering the text in Microsoft Word. If it is the latter then I'm afraid there is probably no way to recover the data. If the data is corrupted then decryption process won't work and there is no easy way to get the data back.

Answer 2

Use Microsoft's built in repair option. Instructions on how to do that and other recovery options can be found here

You may also be missing a patch. Download and install the patch described here (even though it may be difficult with your friend lacking internet access.

Additionally, next time, consider using an online utility or document managing solution such as Google Docs now known as Google Drive.

Answer 3

First of all, you should consider using Microsoft inbuilt repair Option.

To open a specific document by using the Open and Repair feature in Word, follow these steps:

Start Word.

On the File menu, click Open.

Note In Word 2007 or Word 2010, click the Microsoft Office Button, and then click Open.

In the Open dialog box, click to select the file that you want to open.

Click the down arrow on the Open button, and then click Open and Repair.