I'll do my best to help, although I'm no expert. By the way, your wording
seems superb to me- a little dense, but I'd be a hypocrite to condemn that.
1. It would be possible to find and make copies of all MS Word Documents in
the zip files, although I can't give you a solution straight away. At worst,
a short script would do the job (though maybe not particularly fast).
2. Do you know how old the documents are? It wouldn't be surprising if Writer
couldn't open a file, but neither can I say I've had trouble with opening
files from the past decade.
3. The files might still be on your hard drive, but it seems unlikely. If you
selected the "Use full disk" (or whatever the precise term is) option in the
Trisquel installer, it'd be less effort to use your backups instead. If you
need something you didn't back up, though, there may still be a glimmer of
hope that you can recover *some* files from your hard drive.
4. Generally, it's not a good idea 'buy' software, or even get free copies of
such software. Unless otherwise specified, any software you purchase as if it
were a product is probably proprietary, and that stuff can be nasty (all the
more so if it's funded by its victims).
In any case, I'm not sure if you would need such software. Trisquel, as well
as many other GNU/Linux distributions, has near-perfect NTFS support. You
should be able to handle NTFS drives/partitions just like any other, without
the need to convert them to XFS. If you can't see the files, it's safe to
assume you'll need an undeletion tool to get them back.
I hope that helped. Welcome to Trisquel GNU/Linux!
