Tell me more ×
Super User is a question and answer site for computer enthusiasts and power users. It's 100% free, no registration required.

Well, my system crashed as I was saving a text file. When I reopened it, the data was unreadable (shows up as a bunch of ascii NULL characters) I'm guessing that there was a bit or two missing at the beginning of the file or something, and that most of the data is still intact if I just shifted things into the right place. I hope.

Is there any way to remedy this?

(I am running Windows Vista)

share|improve this question
"Shifting" at bit level doesn't happen -- and even if it did, you wouldn't get a bunch of NULs where you had text. – grawity Dec 19 '10 at 12:22
@grawity what usually causes ASCII NUL characters then? – Justin L. Dec 19 '10 at 22:10

3 Answers

The text data might be present in sectors no longer associated with the filename. If your operating system is Windows, you could try running chkdsk.

If the data is valuable you should stop using the system, boot from a rescue CD and make a backup before using the rescue CD to attempt to retrieve the data. Otherwise any traces of the data that are in unallocated sectors will soon become irretrievably overwritten.

The classic answer is to restore from last night's backups and re-do any changes.

share|improve this answer

If you've saved a version of that text file earlier, then Previous Versions may be what you're looking for. Right-click the corrupted file and select Properties, then go to the Previous Versions tab. (Vista or newer on NTFS only.)

Even if that doesn't turn up anything, you can open your disk in a sector editor (booted from a CD or USB) and search the raw contents of your HDD for text that you know had been present in the file. You may get lucky.

share|improve this answer

I had the same problem, what you have to do is install PhotoRec and recover from hard drive only *.txt and *.tx?. What this recovery program does is that recovers info from cluster but it not related to the original file name, etc. So you will get as result a lot of txt files recovered. To avoid open one by one and see which is the one you are looking for, just install FileSeek Pro trial that search text inside txt files. Then you will need to remember some word included in the txt you are looking for.

It worked for me.

share|improve this answer

Your Answer

 
discard

By posting your answer, you agree to the privacy policy and terms of service.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.