FinalWriter Garbage Docs?

[Ilwrath]

When I try to open a FinalWriter doc file,this is what comes up. I have ten years worth of this. Is there anything I can to to retreive these FinalWriter docs?

Hmm.... Yep.  That looks like a FinalWriter file allright.... (Notice the "FORM  ,&SW", looks like an Amiga IFF style header for a SoftWorks file.)

I don't understand your question, though.  
You should be able to just load FinalWriter, and then choose "File > Open" and pick the doc.  Am I missing something here?  Are you trying to export the files out, or what's the problem?

[Ilwrath]

Hmm... So the files are opening badly when opened INTO Final Writer.  Bummer.  

Were these files altered in any way?  FTP'd?  Put through a UNIX/DOS text conversion?  Stored on, or touched by a Macintosh?  

The reason I ask is that in the splattering of characters at the top of the file, there seem to be a few characters showing up in front of the "FORM" key.  My Final Writer files don't seem to have that.  They lead right off with the "FORM" as the first 4 characters.  

I wonder if that is what is confusing Final Writer and causing it to try to open them as text files, instead of Final Writer format files.

[Ilwrath]

Yeah, hardware shouldn't affect Final Writer.  

I have to admit that I am at a loss as to what happened to your files.  

Do you have any backed-up files from before the corruption occurred?  Even if you only have an extra copy of one of your files saved in another place, you could take it and run a diff against the corrupted version and see which bytes get altered.  Maybe that would give a hint as to why the files are now behaving badly.

The other guess may be that something more on the Amiga was damaged than was obvious...  Something is adding/trashing some data on the read.