Extracting Data

[Ping898]

I have a .txt file...made waaaaaaaay back in the day, pre-windows, from 5 1/2 in disks....Word can't interpret it no matter how I tell it to read it. I need to find a way to extract the data from them, but don't know what program created them. notepad and wordpad can't do anything either.

This is an example of what I see using any normal program:


â

ä




å /Ð=àÀÀ< æ

g
`*À ð
d
æ å
Ð å


Any ideas?:idunno:

 

[bignick]

If notepad can't get anything from a .txt file it either isn't a text file(been renamed to .txt) or it's so corrupted that there is nothing left...

Considering you said they were on 5 1/2's from a long time ago...that would be my guess...that the file or disk is just bad. If this is incredibly important, you could take it to an expert, someone that is good enough can get anything off a disk or drive.

 

[Ping898]

If notepad can't get anything from a .txt file it either isn't a text file(been renamed to .txt) or it's so corrupted that there is nothing left...

Considering you said they were on 5 1/2's from a long time ago...that would be my guess...that the file or disk is just bad. If this is incredibly important, you could take it to an expert, someone that is good enough can get anything off a disk or drive.

Yeah I am thinking it might not be corrupt cause it is multiple files on multiple disks that all look about the same. It is hard to believe all would die the same way. I am thinking it wasn't a txt file to begin with, but hoping there might be something out there that can interpret it. I don't know what it was written in, the one program I remember using growing up is DW3.

 

[michaeledward]

Just a thought .... but if I recall, early versions of DOS did not have a file extention. You might try copying the file, and saving it without the 'txt' extention and see what happens there?

Not an expert ...I only got involved with these boxes about 10 years ago ... Win 3.1 era.

Good luck

 

[DavidCC]

you might try a "hex editor". Thats aprogram that will read the contents fo the fle as hexadecimal bytes. Even a file format like MS Word will somewhere in ti have blocks of plain text surorunded by codes and tags that only mean something to MS Word. So by using a hex editor you might be able to distinguish the bytes that are text from the bytes that are formatting or control data for whatever program created the file.

No, I don't know where you can get a hex editor. Try tucows or c/net.