My Little Beef with the RMF

[Albert]

This goes to GDH, the resident staff member here.

After a little confusion with activation and update, I finally get to start a full format recovery. For almost 36b hours, I get to see RMF RECOVERing about 20G of my once destroyed JPEGs, MP3s, RARs, GIFs, and so on.

I am sure everyone who has had such an experience can understand the excitement when you see files after files coming back to life.

The excitement was short-lived, however, as most of the files RECOVERed, let's say 95%, were garbage.

JPEGs can not be previewed, not to mention opened. DOCs are open-able, but the content is nothing but symbols and random junk. MP3s, VIDEOS? Forget about it.

Another problem is with the duplicated files that were created during the process.

Let's say the original file is by the name of "TEST.jpg", the recovered file is not simply "TEST.jpg", but rather a series of "TEST_1.jpg", "TEST_2.jpg", "TEST_3.jpg".............

What the hell is all that?

The same goes for all types of other files. and none of these files are usable.

So to sum up my little frustration, YES, RMF really works, it WILL recover all your lost files!!!

But they're all junk, that's all.

It's like when you lost your car, and after three weeks the cops tell you they found it in some ditch, and you can go get it.

You go pick it up, it's still your car, but the engine is gone, the tires are slashed, the bumpers are destroyed, the glasses shattered....etc, etc, etc.

It's still your car, but it's not.

Maybe a terrible analogy, but you know what I mean.

[GDH]

It sounds like your old file system records are very screwed around. I cant find your original post telling me of the initial problem. Please give me a quick summary again (or cut and paste from your last post) and I will tell you the best search to run.

A Complete Format Recover uses the old Operating System records (each file has an MFT record) to locate and find deleted files. These records are stored at the start of the disk and contain the name of the file and the location of the file on the disk. It sounds like yours have been screwed up so that they no longer point to the correct location on the drive.

Please run the program again and this time click on Manually Select Options. In the SEARCH tab take the tick out of "search for deleted files" so that you are only searching for "lost" files. Now run this search for a small select number of file types, lets say JPEG and DOC. This search uses the file header and footer to find the deleted files and thus the search results should be valid. Preview the files in the results screen to view their content (you can even do this while the search is in progress). However, because the file name is stored in the MFT record, you will not get the original name back (there are some fast ways to rename files which I can tell you about later). If you want to search you disk in sections, run the same search but this time in the OPTIONS - ADVANCED tab put a tick in the box for "prompt for start cluster". Note down the cluster that you are up to before you stop the search (the cluster number is in the progress bar window) and then you can restart the search at that same point.