Repairing NTFS files after chkdsk goes wrong

[StrangeStuff]

I was using Partition Commander to modify a logical NTFS partition on a new HD. There was a power problem and the maching frooze. I rebooted but the drive was unrecognisable. After two emails to the support people for Partition Commander I had the drive being recognised but WinXP wanted to run chkdsk on the drive. It found numerous errors that that is said were successfully fixed and when I intially looked at the drive all the files and directories seem fine. However, closer inspection and the files are almost all corrupted or cross linked to other data.

Most of the files on the drive a media files (images, mp3s etc).

Can you recommend a utility that will scan the drive at a cluster level, find the file headers and then piece togther the files? I have already tried Stop Softs Recover Lost Data but it thinks all the files are fine.

Any help would be appreciated.

Happy New Year to All

[GDH]

Hi,

Please download Recover My Files from www.recovermyfiles.com. There are two options....

The first thing you should try is a "Complete Format Recover" of the "physical drive". Search only for the default selected file types (dont add other file types to the search, particularly MP3, as you will only slow it down). At the end of the search your old partition (or whats left of it) will be displayed in the Recover My Files results screen. Click on the files found to preview their content.

The problem with this method is that it is using the Windows Master File Table (MFT) records, which as you describe, may be so screwed around that they now point to the wrong data.

The next thing to try is a search for files by their file structure. Go to the main screen of Recover My Files, click on the OPTIONS button, and in the SEARCH tab put a tick in the box for searching for "lost" files (turn search for deleted files off). Now run a "Complete File Search" of the drive for selected file types (Run a separate search form MP3 and video files as these are the most resource intensive to find).

A search for lost files will find files by their file structure, eg. header and footer. The original name will not be recovered and the files will be named "Recovered.....". Click on the files in the results screen to preview their content.

Are there a number of CHKDSK files on your PC? They may contain valuable data that can still be recovered.

Let me know how it goes and I can give you further instructions.

[StrangeStuff]

Hi GDH,

I ran "Recover My Files" configured to look for lost files by signature/structure and it recovered 99% of the graphics files without error. As soon as I previewed them and saw they were fine I immediately brought the product and was able to save the recovered files.

I will now try it on the other media files (the more dificult audio and video file) and will report back.

I have to say they I have tried the demos of eight other product that purport to recover delete/lost files and this is the only product that I found at a reasonable price that had the advanced feature of looking for lost files by structure/signature. When chkdsk goes wrong this seems to be the only way to get files back.

All I have to do now go through and rename the files back to thier original, a much easier task than recovery.

Many thanks from New Zealand

[GDH]

Thats good news, I am glad you got your photos back.

Video and music are more difficult because they are ususally larger and can be fragmented. If they are fragmented there is no way to find the end of the file.

You may find ExplorerView (www.explorerview.com) a quick way of renaming the photos using Windows Explorer. You can preview the photo in Explorer, and use the F2 key to rename the file - its quite quick when you get the hang of it.

[StrangeStuff]

After quite a bit of effort, I have tried numerous strategies for recovering the movie files and the biggest problems appears that the software can not reliably find the file end. In particular, after searching for lost .mpg files, "Recover-My-Files" returned 15 files that were all 145 GB, which is non-sense, as this is the actual size of the partition. I then tried to limit the maximum file size (I know none of the files was larger than 380 MB) but this ended up setting all the recovered files to 380 MB in size.

I have used a free low level viewer, "DiskExplorer for NTFS" and with some care I can determine the start and end of quite a number of the lost files. Is there a means I can get "Recover-My-Files" to find the start of the file and for me to specify the end or in my case the actual size, as I know this to the exact byte as the OS has stored this correctly?

Regards

[admin]

Hi,

How are you determining the end of the file?

What version of Recover My Files are you using?

There may be some things we can do to improve MPEG recovery.

Did you try and play the 380mb.mp4 files? They should have played up to the end of the file and then stopped. Did this happen?

[StrangeStuff]

I initially allowed Recover-My-Files to determine the size but that did not work. I know from WinXP the actual file size for the original files but not the recovered ones.

I have just updated to 3.9 and will see if that is any better than 3.84.

I tried and was able to successfully play one of the files up to the end. However, the actual file size was larger than the content as cross checked against the original file size.

In the case of media files, it would be good to be able to preview them up to the end, mark this location and only recover the file to this location.

[GDH]

Finding the end of some file types can be very difficult. At the moment the best option is to fix the length of the recovered file and then use a video editing program to return the file to the correct length.