98 Wordpad doc too large to open, will msdos help open?

[valwordy]

I've tried everything I can think of! I built a wordpad doc up to 57,454k and now I can't read it
Tried winzip, now I'm down to the gritty black and white world of ms-dos, where I'm lost and afraid 
Is there a way to open that file, maybe carve it up into smaller parts, using ms-dos? If so please explain in Pinhead dialect, if I were smart this would never have happened.

[Deerpark]

Could you please explain what happens when you try to open it? What error message do you get?
Are you using windows 98?
When did the problem start?
Did anything happen around the time the problem started?

Right now I don't think winzip or dos is going to help you though.

[valwordy]

Bad command or file name, it says, when I try to open the file. It's Win 98, and I noticed the problem as soon as I finished adding to the doc (which was ok before that). I added blocks of text, photos, and audio files. The text and photos were not a problem, I think the problem came when I added audio files.

[Deerpark]

So you added content to the file, saved and closed it and then received the error when trying to reopen the file?
Or did you receive the error while editing the file?
How are opening the file? By double clicking it or through the open file dialog in Wordpad?

[valwordy]

Yes, I added content to the file, saved and closed it... and then received the error when trying to reopen the file in msdos. However, if I just try to open the file with a simple doubleclick (or right click and 'open') I get an hourglass and a blank white screen, the wordpad format is there but no content. I once waited over an hour. Finally I have to ctrl-alt-del to make it go away, it won't close normally.
So I went and fiddled with msdos, figuring experience is a great teacher.  Usually I find a way and learn something, but this thing has me baffled.

[Deerpark]

To me it sounds like the file got corrupted somehow. You can try giving scandisk a shot and see if there's a problem on the harddisk.
Here is an article describing how to run scandisk.
http://www.computerhope.com/software/scandisk.htm#03

If you got more than one drive I suggest you scan them all. (Only hard drives, not floppy or cd-rom drives.) A standard scan should suffice.

You can also try opening the file in notepad. This might enable you to recover at least the text.

Else hang tight and hopefully a solution will surface.

[valwordy]

Ok, I'll try the scan disk...never thought of trying notepad, since I read somewhere that notepad only handles stuff smaller than wordpad does.
There is a way to make notepad open larger, IIRC...just didn't pay any attention to that at the time.
Thanks so much for your help! I'll try scan disk and see what develops!

[Deerpark]

Yeah I know notepad have a file size limit but I just can't remember what the limit is right now... so I though it was worth a shot. The worst that can happen is that notepad tells you the file is too big to be opened.

[Deerpark]

I just thought of something else you can try.
If the file is too big to open in notepad then try Notepad++. It doesn't have a file size limit. You might want to make a copy of your document before opening it in notepad++ just in case.
You can download Notepad++ by clicking here.