Free do-it-yourself recovery of lost or corrupt MS Office files

We have received an interesting support request, I'd like to share with you.

Here is what client wrote:

“Disappointment! Power outage during VISIO 2000 session corrupted my saved .vsd file. File were saved onto CD. If I try opening file, I get standard visio error, file is not a visio file.”

SoftAmbulance don't have any CD Recovery software, however I would recommend you some steps that can help recover your data with a decent chance and completely free. Please note: these methods could be used to recover any MS Office document and much more other programs. It's not just MS Visio instruction

Checking data integrity

First, try if you can copy file from CD to HDD, then it was written correctly, and probably corruption was during Visio's Save procedure. Please try to open it in Open Office Draw and if it succeed save with a different name, then open in Visio. Open Office is much more tolerant to errors.

Recovering data from temporary folder

Next step, would be checking your HDD. Normally open Office files are cashed in Windows temporary folder. Plus Windows creates a disk image before writing to CD. These two are both good places to check if it there. So please open temporary folder, sort all the files by types and start opening .vsd files one by one. Normally MS Office use temporary names for it's files in temporary folder, so I doubt you'll be able to find it by name.

Checking temporary CD\DVD image

Load clean writeable CD or DVD to disk drive tray, open Explorer and go to your CD, you should see an empty CD and a link "Files awaiting to be burned" or something similar.(My apologies, I haven't burned CDs for several years, I can't remember exact text in the string). Clicking the link will bring you a list of files, that can be copied as simple files to different place.

I hope you would be successful in your quest.