Can TiVo Videos be recovered ?

[SalemCat]

I have a 750GB SATAII External HD full of TiVo Videos. One day it became invisible to my Vista OS. Turns out the external HD Power Brick failed; but before I realized that was the problem I did some troubleshooting, which including entering Vista Disk Managemnet and Initializing the HD. Big mistake.

Now it is listed as RAW, Healthy, Active, Primary Partition, and is assigned as Drive G. It has not been Formatted, nor has anything new been written to it.

I believe it was NTFS, and it can be accessed with eSATA, which is what I was doing, or with USB2.

I'd like to recover my videos, but I see no mention of TiVo Videos being supported by Recover My Files.

Can they be recovered with your software ?

PS I am running your demo now, and it is finding thousands of jpg files, which I also had on the HD in a Backup Folder. So your software would work for the jpgs, but as I had them backed up online I don't really need them anyhow.

The TiVo videos were not backed up anywhere - they are too big, and are not mission-critical. I'd like them back, though.

[GDH]

Hi,

You should be able to recover your tivo movies from the drive.

Make sure you don't format it or write any new data to the drive.

The first type of search you need to run with Recover My Files is a "Fast Format Recover". When you get to the drive selection window, select and search the "physical" hard drive. This is a fast search. If it works, it should find the old file system within about 30 minutes.

If the Fast Format Recover does not work, then then next type of search to run is a "Complete Format Recover". Again, search the "physical" drive. In the file type selection window, search ONLY for the default selected file types, .doc, .xls, .ppt, .jpeg (the 3 types) .avi, .zip, .pdf.

Both of the Format Recover search are designed to try and locate the Master File Table - an index to all the missing files on your disk. If you read the first post in this forum - it will give more detailed instructions to run a "Complete Format Recover" - and you will understand why finding your MFT will enable you to recover all files, including the TIVO movies.

Good luck - please let us know how it goes.