Unspecified Error, word/document.xml, Line:2, Column: 0

It looks like I'm (sinking) in the same boat!  If you could help, I'd be very grateful.  I did a lot of work on a work computer running office 07, and Mendeley, a reference citation manager.  (which probably messed up the XML)  It gives me the line column error seen so many times here, at line 2 column 33210.  It did occur on a jump drive, so it may be fatally corrupted, but given the heavy use of Mendeley, I hope it's the typical fixable error.  

If you can help, the file is posted here: (renamed as a zip before being deposited). 

https://www.dropbox.com/s/p87bchbg83c9cik/From%20flashdrive.zip

It has many comments as well as many inline citations.  (none needed) The file is probably the oldest one available, (not opened by Word since the emailed file was where it was discovered) though one emailed immediately after the fatal save event might be older. it's about 6 pages, including the references, which are less important.

Many thanks,

LabQ

Hi Jeeped,

I do not know if you're still willing to help with corrupted documents but it's worth a shot.

My document has been corrupted for some reasons unknown to me; the Unspecified Error, word/document.xml, Line:2, Column: 0 error. It saved perfectly fine and I was able to open it a couple of times afterwards without saving any changes, yet as of yesterday I'm no longer able to open it. When I accept the recovery Word provides I'm left with a bare document containing nothing more than three lines of text and an image.

I tried resolving the problem myself by first opening the word/document.xml file (after unzipping the .docx file) in Notepad++ and giving each XML tag its own line. This way Word could provide me with a more insightful error message than the standard Line 2, Column 0 mumbo jumbo. It indeed gave me a more specific line to look at, although still an unspecified error... but I was wrong in thinking that it would be more helpful to me.

The line it specified was line 10122 at column 0. How useful as this is the '</w:sdt>' which together with its opening tag '<w:sdt>' contains almost everything of value my document has. It also explains why Word recovery leaves me a bare recovered word document to look at, as it just simply deletes these tags and everything between them and calls it a fix!

I hope you might be of more help to be, so I'd thank you in advance.

Kind regards,

A sly Fox

PS. Some more info about my document:

• It is a heavily formatted interview 9 pages long;
• The first 2 pages contain some loose text with an image on each page;
• the following 7 pages contain text formatted in a very long table;
• Contains both Dutch and English text.

Link to file (with proper lined XML tags, I changed the extension to ,zip to make sure skydrive doesn't attempt to open the document, which it ofcourse can't): http://1drv.ms/1bXOitu

This type of catastrophic corruption has to do with the read/write buffer of a removable drive not being flushed before the drive is removed. It amounts to a corrupt ZIP structure which must be repaired before the contents can be extracted and manually repaired through text editing of the XML tags.

Of all the ZIP repair tools available that I have tried, I've found that AZR (Advanced Zip Repair Copyright © 2001 - 2012 by DataNumen, Inc.) works best on these type of corruptions and will get content back up to the point of the corruption. It's pay-for-play software.but it's good at what it does and I couldn't repair these corruptions without it The remainder of the XML file is filled with programming NULLs and useless for all intents and purposes. I've had requests to 'squeeze out just a little more' but the answer is 'that's impossible'. The content is either hopelessly scrambled or unequivocally non-existent.

Since the XML was effectively truncated at the point of corruption, the only thing left to do is close all of the XML tags that remain open and retry the DOCX.

The other types of corruption are the Unspecified Error, word/document.xml, Line:2, Column: 0 variety and these have largely been dealt with with the various Office service packs and Microsoft Knowledge Base articles. There are still a few postings a week from people seeking help but nowhere near the amount that there used to be.

Top man! I am sure this will help him a bit.

Is it possible to post a tutorial on how you repair these files?

I attempted to open this by changing the name to "test.docx.zip" and then extracting this however I was stuck again as it said unable to extract as no files found.

I am aware that you have to remove or fill in empty xml tags but I was unable to even open this in a xml editor, can you tell me what tools etc you use?

Thanks!!

Harshal