searching for one file type only

[HulkXD]

I bought a Dell Inspiron, and a very long story short, the morons in customer service told me to reformat my hard drive to reset my IP address. Not the smartest thing to do, but they are supposed to be the experts.

All I care about is finding my video files, which are of my son's birth. I've found some files, but I get the error message in windows media player that the codec cannot be found. I thought I'd be better off to speed up the search by only selecting the AVI file format, but I wonder is this the best way to do it?

Thanks.

[GDH]

Hi,

The best way to find your movie files is to do the following:

1. Make sure you are using the latest version of Recover My Files available from Data Recovery Software to Undelete Files; Disk recovery; Recover Deleted Files

2. Run the program and select Complete Format Recover. Click Next;

3. In the drive selection window, select the "physical" drive which corresponds to the size of the drive on which your files were lost. Click Next;

4. In the file type selection window, select the following file types: avi, bmp, jpeg (the three types), doc, xls, ppt, pdf, zip, wav

5. Let this search run for at least 2 hours - and if the OS Items number in the progress window is still increasing after 2 hours, then continue to let it run until the OS items number stops going up quickly.

6. At the end of the search, look in Folder View of the results screen for your videos in their original folder. The best results are usually toward the bottom of the folder list, so look here first.

You will probably find that the best results come from folder view, as this method has used the MFT entry to find the file - this tracks fragmentation of files, and as video files are usually big, will probably be best.

You may also like to try saving the files from File Type View called "Recovered_AVI_1" as these files have been located by finding the header and footer of the AVI file type.

Good luck.

[HulkXD]

When I stop the search, do I let it continue the search of the current sector or partition or whatever?

[GDH]

Yes, let the search results rebuild and display in the results screen.