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Solve : cant read old documents in my old hard drive?

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please help I have tried all I know to OPEN my old drive on my new computer I can bring up everything, all the pictures are good and the same but all my documents are symbols, not words. I tried to open with wordpad but they were created on word and it doesnt GIVE me that choice ene though i have word on this new one i hope that isnt too confusingLaunch WORD and use the File menu Open etc to select your file and Open the document.

If that fails you have a problem I cannot advise upon.

If that succeeds it shows you have a good document,
and the problem is probably due to the Windows "File Associations" needing correction so that Windows will properly determine from the file extension what application should open it.

Alan
Try right-clicking the file/choose "open with" / choose M$Word.

Alan <>< Hi

Sorry, I disagree because on my system the "Open with" option is chaotic.
The "Open With" provides :-
3 options for a *.doc file
2 options for a *.lst
6 options for a *.txt
no "open with" for *.bat
no "open with" for *.cmd
no "open with" for *.odt
no "open with" for *.ods

These chaotic options are SOMETHING to do with Windows knowledge of the various applications that claim relevant capabilities.
This knowledge is probably independent of the "File associations" knowledge,
but any sort of "Windows knowledge" can be mistaken at the best of times,
so if File Associations is trashed the "open with" options could be trashed.

n.b. of the last 2 extensions, Windows knows nothing, and I like it that way.
It knows nothing because *.odt and *.ods are Open Office documents,
and I have Portable Open Office "installed" on a non-system partition,
so my METHOD is the ONLY fail-safe technique I know off.

Regards
Alan
I was addressing 'mustloveparrots' issue, not yours. This solution has worked in the past many times.

Alan <>< Alan

You are wrong. I have no issues.

Your solution will often work, but sometimes it will fail.

It fails on my system.

My solution has never failed me.

Alan
Then all you have to do is right click, select Open With, click Choose Default, select/browse for program, check Make Default.Quote

Hi

Sorry, I disagree because on my system the "Open with" option is chaotic.
The "Open With" provides :-
3 options for a *.doc file
2 options for a *.lst
6 options for a *.txt
no "open with" for *.bat
no "open with" for *.cmd
no "open with" for *.odt
no "open with" for *.ods

These chaotic options are something to do with Windows knowledge of the various applications that claim relevant capabilities.
This knowledge is probably independent of the "File associations" knowledge,
but any sort of "Windows knowledge" can be mistaken at the best of times,
so if File Associations is trashed the "open with" options could be trashed.

n.b. of the last 2 extensions, Windows knows nothing, and I like it that way.
It knows nothing because *.odt and *.ods are Open Office documents,
and I have Portable Open Office "installed" on a non-system partition,
so my method is the ONLY fail-safe technique I know off.


"Open With" data is part of file association data, but it definitely is a bit convoluted. Thankfully, I recently added the ability to enumerate the items that would appear in the menu from my File library.

Basically, it all starts in the key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FileExts\"

within the OpenWithProgIDs and OpenWithList Keys there (if present)

For OpenWithList, the key is the "MRUList" key, which stores a character sequence. the other values in the key are loaded into the Open with menu in alphabetic order.

The Application Executable names are easily converted to full names of the program with some calls to the version API- this is what my program does, and I believe explorer does this as well.

The "OpenWithProgIDs" entry lists other "ProgIDs" that need to be consulted. for example, with a default Windows install, a .txt file's "progID" is "txtfile". the default value of the "extension" key, such as HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.txt, will have a default value set to that extensions progID. so HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\txtfile can contain all the relevant shell extensions and association data for any number of different files- such as if HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.log had a default value of txtfile, it's association data would become txtfile.

It's a long and convoluted process, since there are often a number of entries here, but the end result can be pretty neat, with a few tricks with VERSION and the extraction of the program icons:


In this case, I have selected JPG files.





Alan,
I'm glad you don't have a problem with your system. That's great! Unfortunately many folks do have this kind of problem. In that case I proposed a solution that has worked many times for me. And you are right, sometimes it doesn't work.

Thank kpac

Alan <><


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