recovered files not usable

[dsvasan82]

hi wrongly i formatted my toshiba laptop in middle i cancelled and lost all my important files ,so i bought recover my files v 3.98 and started with complete file search and selected word (doc,wps), mpeg, avi, psd, jpeg files i got something around 35000 files and after saving files in my hard disk i find that my single avi and mpeg i split into many by size of 1024 , and the word doc is not opening correctly

[GDH]

Hi,

When you run the complete format recover, follow the instructions in the first sticky post of the forum.

The files that you will see in Folder View, should have their original names and folder structure.

In the results screen, look in Folder View, and lick on your doc files? Can you preview them? If there were multiple partitions found (your files system may have been duplicated so there is a phantom partition found) make sure you check each one, as one should contain valid data that you can preview.

[amartuccio]

Hi.

Unfortunately I don't have a solution, but I thought it was worth mentioning that I have the same problem.

The full scan detected many MFT partitions. I selected one that looked correct (similar HDD size in GB and same date that disk was formatted) and it rebuilt all my directories and file names but 99% of the actual files are corrupt.

It looks like most of the file was recovered, then it was corrupted at the end - This obviously means I cannot preview the files....but if I preview a .txt. file I find most of it in tact, then at the end it is just random characters.

Makes me think when the pieces of the file were joined up, the last few parts were wrong/corrupt/overwritten (couldn't be overwritten because I haven't written to the disk at all). Thus 99% of the files are corrupt, but 95% of all the corrupt files are actually OK....just the end is wrong, but it corrupts the whole file.

Maybe I have the "phantom" partition problem - so how do I know which MFT partitions to choose out of the massive list?

If I do a recovery using raw recovery I get the same problem as in post
Bad Sectors and Missing MFT on NTFS
It detects multiples of the same file sizes, but only very few different files. eg. I had say 5,000 large jpgs - it finds 70,000 jpgs but maybe 1000 of each size (so only 70 different jpgs). Most are corrupt, but a few work....I may have recovered 20 out of 5000 jpgs!!

p.s. Thanks for the tip about not having to let the MFT partition building part of the scan run until it has completed. I didn't know you could stop it and it would still build based on what data it had found....a good tool for testing since I have so many MFT partitions. Plus one of my partitions made my PC run out of RAM and the program crashed after 10 hours of scanning - I can now partially scan that MFT partition then stop it and see what result I get.

[GDH]

Hi,

Sorry for the delay in responding to you - spam posters here (grrrrr) screw up my new message notification alerts.

Because the file and folder name information is stored in a table at the start of the disk, it is very possible for it to get screwed up so that it no longer points to the correct location for the files on the disk. This will lead to finding the entire file and folder structure, but the files found will be corrupt.

The reverse of the above situation is that the file and folder records are correct and point to the right location on the disk, but the actual data on the disk has been overwritten by something else and destroyed - this will cause the same problem.

The best thing I can suggest for you is that you try the new beta version of Recover My Files v4, which does some more fancy partition matching routines. Please send an email to support@getdata.com and specifically request to try RMFv4.

Thank you.