Help with formatted & corrupt HD

[ash]

Hi

First off i think your recivery software is brilliant i first used it early on this year when i formatted my external hard drive by mistake it worked great and recovered all my files.

Last week my computer went wrong and wouldnt boot up so i tried to repair the corrupt windows in recovery mode this didnt work so i had to format my hard drive and install windows again however after it formatted it wouldnt install windows for some reason so it had to be formatted again.

After windows was installed i tried to recover the files but it mainly came up computer system files and pictures from websites ive looked at, when it was finished it just listed files as recovered 1 2 3 and so on and the folders had red crosses on them quite alot of them were corrupt aswel, when i tried to save them it will not rebuild them the way they were before.

Any help would be greatley appreciated. The hard drive is 400gb but im not worried about recovering all the files on it such as my music photos and some other stuff as i have them backed up, im concerned about recovering 4 years of uni work, which i can see the files however they are not named and in the format they used to be in.

Thanks

[GDH]

Hi,

Your file and folder names are all stored in a table at the start of the disk called the Master File Table (MFT). When Windows wants to find a file, it goes and looks up the MFT, a bit like the index in a book, to get the file name and its location on the disk.

In your scenario, a lot of changes have been made to the start of the disk and it sounds like the MFT has been overwritten/corrupted/destroyed.

Once the MFT is gone, you can't get the file and folder names back.

The only search you can now run is a Complete File Search, which identifies specific file types by their header and footer, but because it can no longer use the MFT, the program gives these files names like "Recovered_JPEG_1".