MS word doucments

Alright, ill start from the beging. We had a laptop stolen here from work and aparntly its been gone for about a month. Well last thursday the big boss (Tom) wanted invortory on the computers. When it came to the laptop and it could not be found then all hell broke lose. Everyone looked for the laptop all day long to no avial. So we all went home that night wondering where it was.

The next morning someone found the laptop in the locked cabinet right where it was supposed to be. Now since im the network admin here, the laptop made its way to me. I was looking through it i noticed it looked awful bare (nothing installed) even though this laptop was about 3 months old and had software to program the machines out back on it. Now it had nothing, so i looked at the logs, and sure enough the laptop had just been formated the night before at 10:48 pm.

That means that the guy who stole it formated to remove anything he put on there so he couldn't be indetified. So i proceded to recover the drive, which i did succesfully. I found a wide variety of software on it (ie: 3dmark, prime95, wcupid etc..). But the most important thing i found were word doucments. So i recovered them and when i tried to open them, it come up with that garbage that word does when it can't read the file.

Now my question to you guys is, is there anyway to find out what they say? in paticular im looking for names.

a hex editor comes to mind.

Maybe you could post one of the documents here to see if anyone else can open it? Off hand, it sounds like you might have the wrong version of Word. That is, Word 97 cannot open a Word 2000 document (as an example). Also, the docs might be in some other format...Word Perfect for example, but the former user just saved 'em as ".doc" files.

yea i thought about that. And i was gonna post one but i don't have anywhere to host it without setting up an account. They are word doucments, and im pretty sure the are office xp. I tried opening them with both office xp and office 2k. But nothing

Try using Notepad. It'll still give you all the unreadable symbols and characters, but it should allow you to read the text of the documents. You'll have to wade through the junk, but enough of the text should be readable to get the idea of the documents. If that doesn't work, the docs might have been encrypted (?).

hook me up with the .doc file I'll probably be able to find out what it is "if anything"

where would you like me too hook up to?

how big is it ?, or you can just copy/past and email it to me

you got pm

yhpm right back.

I sent you a couple of them

send em to me too. I'll take alook. aim.

If you are looking for names, maybe the internet cookies in the temp directory might give you some clues? Fire them to me aswell, I'll take a look. james at vinyljunky dot net .

hehehe i wanna know what the guy was doing with it...

they had extentions pf "office, excel, etc...", but they didnt seem to be those types of files, cuz when I looked at one it looked like an audio driver :/

goofy... maybe he was trying to cover stuff like that up with legit seeming work... wow lotta trouble to go through...