Oh, you're saying manually piece it together like a puzzle by copy pasting? I thought you meant take the hex code to generate a new file from the code. Well, I've found a large chunk of the file, but it's not all of it and I can't find the rest and what's there is too jumbled with chunks missing. An...

But if the text is jumbled on the drive, wouldn't any file I create yield gibberish too? Because when I looked at a test .rtf file, it wasn't jumbled, the text was normal, gibberish free, as it would appear in Wordpad.

Here's the situation right now: I created a test .rtf file (not on the HDD I'm trying to recover from) and copy pasted a bunch of text into it and saved it and then I opened the file in HxD, just to see what it would look like. I could see the whole text no problem in HxD, preceeded by some technica...

But is it something simple htat I could learn to do quickly on the internet or is it something really complicated?

Yes, you would need to look for strings of text, taking into consideration that you would be looking at it in HEX. You can explore the functions of WinHex to determine if you can do this with the free version. I've installed HxD and opened the partition and I've found some strings that there's a go...

We already know that the file referenced by the MFT if filled with garbage. So, you need to find all RAW RTF files in hopes that one of them contains the data you are looking for. Alternatively, you could use use a hex editor, manually search the drive for the file's contents, then carve it out to ...

So I should not necessarily be looking exclusively at the folder that the file is in? (nor the folder where Wordpad stores temp files?) I should be looking at all .rtf files, regardless of the filename, is that right? Is it possible that the contents of the file will be stored in some kinda temp fil...

Yes, I'm accessing the drive through another computer. Can recovery software help me in this situation? Given that this is not a deleted file, but that the file I want still exists and I need the earlier, pre-crash version, which isn't changed in this strange way. Obviously, Recouva found something,...

The situation is different because in the previous situation there were no saved files. What was lost was lost from an open Wordpad window. This time, what happened is that a file that is saved on my desktop got mangled in a crash. The files is a few days old and I've been working on it daily. It's ...

This is a different file.