Trouble opening saved files

[Guesswork2000]

A couple of weeks ago, my 160GB external hard disk crashed. Most of the items on it were video files from my Sony hard drive handycam from which I had very recently deleted those files. Since I had no luck recovering the organized and labeled files from my external drive (it was appearing as a physical drive but instead of being a 160GB drive, it showed 0.00MB as the size -- what does this mean?).

Anyway, I ran the demo version to find my files on the videocam's hard drive and it took 4 days! No kidding! There were 2 drives of the same size that appeared when I plugged the videocam in, so I ran a search on both, but only searched for mpeg files. By the time the search was over, it had recovered nearly 7,000 mpeg files (mostly as lost files) which totalled to around 50,000GB!!

I bought the full version of Recover My Files and started saving the files. But when I tried opening the saved files with Windows Media Player which is my default player, it gave me an error message saying that it couldn't open or play that type of file. Now what?

Please help me! I've been completely stressing about this and I thought I was on my final stretch, but now this! I know there has to be a way to get through this and pick out the files I need, but I just don't know what it is...

Thanks...

[GDH]

Hi,

If your drive showed as 0.00mb it means that your PC could not correctly talk to the drive. This probably means that the dive is physically screwed. The best thing to do is to try and remove any variables that could be causing the problem (eg. faulty cables or external drive bays) and connect the drive directly to your PC via a reliable cable. If you still cannot get your PC to see the correct size of the physical drive then your only option would be to send it to a hardware recovery service.

In relation to your handycam, you should see 1 physical drive only in Recover My Files that will be the same size as your handy cam hard drive. Select and search this.

It is hard to know exactly how your handycam streams data to the disk. I would start by running a "Fast Format Recover" on the physical drive. This is a fast search, please let me know the results.

Next run a "Complete File Search" of the physical drive. Once you have found about 20 MPEG files, stop the search, save the files, and see if they play. Please let me know the results of this.


Thank you.

[Guesswork2000]

Everytime I plug my videocam into my computer, "Drive I (No label)" and "3 Physical" appear. They are both exactly the same size (27.64GB), and approximately the same size as my videocams hard drive (30GB).

I ran a Fast File Recover on both drives where 0 files were found.

I did a Complete File Search on the 3 Physical drive, and instead of finding 20 then saving the files, I luckily was busy and ended up with 170 files from which I selected groups of files and ended up saving 107 files (84.05GB).

I had about 45 files ranging from 6,000KB to 11,000KB and 65 ranging from 12,000KB to 17,000KB. What was strange is that when I previewed them, they were all of the same clip.

The largest file I saved (the saving process took over 12 hours) was 28,963,826KB. There were 13 files of this size but I selected to save just 1 when it was taking so long. I previewed the 7:14:33 clip, and it was one huge clip of all the videos I had in my videocam before I deleted the contents of its hard drive, but there was no audio. It just played the contents silently as one long recording.

The last file I saved was 30,000KB and was again of the same clip as the other 105 files, except a little longer.

In the end I think I'm just glad that I have the video files back, even if I have to edit the 7 hour file with another program to separate the different files as needed. It is going to be tedious though. But I have been running the program (along with my camera and an external drive) for a whole week now, and I really don't want to go through the whole process again unless I know I'll get better results, and how could we possibly know that, right?

My concern is that there is no audio, which is obviously is a bummer. Why do you think that happened? I'm not sure how much value this information would have, but when I opened the files with Windows Media Explorer, before the files actually played, I got the following messages: Connecting, Sending request for codec, Error downloading codec, and then the file would play. This is in contrast from before where the files wouldn't play at all.

What do you suggest I do next?

Thank you!!

[Guesswork2000]

Everytime I plug my videocam into my computer, "Drive I (No label)" and "3 Physical" appear. They are both exactly the same size (27.64GB), and approximately the same size as my videocams hard drive (30GB).

I ran a Fast File Recover on both drives where 0 files were found.

I did a Complete File Search on the 3 Physical drive, and instead of finding 20 then saving the files, I luckily was busy and ended up with 170 files from which I selected groups of files and ended up saving 107 files (84.05GB).

I had about 45 files ranging from 6,000KB to 11,000KB and 65 ranging from 12,000KB to 17,000KB. What was strange is that when I previewed them, they were all of the same clip.

The largest file I saved (the saving process took over 12 hours) was 28,963,826KB. There were 13 files of this size but I selected to save just 1 when it was taking so long. I previewed the 7:14:33 clip, and it was one huge clip of all the videos I had in my videocam before I deleted the contents of its hard drive, but there was no audio. It just played the contents silently as one long recording.

The last file I saved was 30,000KB and was again of the same clip as the other 105 files, except a little longer.

In the end I think I'm just glad that I have the video files back, even if I have to edit the 7 hour file with another program to separate the different files as needed. It is going to be tedious though. But I have been running the program (along with my camera and an external drive) for a whole week now, and I really don't want to go through the whole process again unless I know I'll get better results, and how could we possibly know that, right?

My concern is that there is no audio, which is obviously is a bummer. Why do you think that happened? I'm not sure how much value this information would have, but when I opened the files with Windows Media Explorer, before the files actually played, I got the following messages: Connecting, Sending request for codec, Error downloading codec, and then the file would play. This is in contrast from before where the files wouldn't play at all.

What do you suggest I do next?

Thank you!!

[GDH]

Hi,

The movie file format is quite complicated. Recovery is also problematic because the files are usually quite large and can get fragmented.

It may be possible to get better results - i.e. video with sound - but I think it would need an expert to take a look at exactly what has happened on the drive.

If you want to keep trying, the best option I could give you would be to take an image (an exact copy) of the camera drive. You would write the image to a file on your computer. The image is compressed, but you would need at least 30gb of free space to make sure you had enough room.

Once you take the image, the contents of the drive have been preserved in the image file. You can then continue to use the camera, try other options yourself, or burn the image to DVD and send it to us to look at.

I guess it all depends on how much you value the sound to the video?