guys do you know of any good programs that will recover corrupted files
on a formatted/corrupted HD. I have a HD that just crashed, I formatted
Damn fool thing to do, formatting it. WTF were you thinking?
What file system is it - FATxx or NTFS?
If FATxx, see the relevant section at:
http://cquirke.mvps.org/9x
If NTFS, well, this is where the downside kicks in, big time.
Rule #1: Do NOT write to the at-risk HD, and that includes not
exposing it to Windows versions later than Win98SE, as all of these
will initiate unsolicited writes (AutoChk "fixing", System Restore,
thumbnailers, indexers, AutoPlay, etc.)
Formatting kinda breaks Rule #1. Specifically, in FATxx it overwrites
both FATs and thus destroys the info you would need to link together
the loose clusters that hold file data contents.
Recovery strategies will generally assume unfragmented cluster chains
and recover these from recovered directory entries, but any files that
are larger than one cluster and fragmented, will be barfed.
There are a variety of automated tools that can recover stuff from
NTFS, but I've found nothing like DiskEdit for FATxx, nor is
byte-level documentatrion of NTFS structure easy to come by.
I was able to use getdatarecovery ntfs and some other programs
that recovered my formatted data. I got everything but when I open my
.docs or pics they're still corrupted.
JPEGs are a good thing to look at. If they start off OK but from a
certain point, they contain garbage, then that's the loss of chaining
info that is biting your ass. Thank Format for that :-/
I tried d/ling free and demo software to see if they can fix the
corrupted docs and pics I found but so far none have worked.
Yup.
Can anyone think of any software that worked for them or
something that may work for me. even if I can find a demo
that will show me it really does work.
On NTFS, your best bet may be R-Studio, which can be used from a Bart
CDR boot (which avoids Windows risks of spontaneous writes).
I don't mind having to pay for it. This has my wifes and I wedding
pics and some of her art work that I would really love to get back
for the both of us....
Oyy... pics are often too big to easily back up.
Why on Earth did you format the drive???
There are some tools well-suited for recovering pictures in particular
- they look for the embedded JPEG marker at the start of the file
data, and can thus work without any directory entry cues. But without
these cues, it's up to you to set the file length, and fragmentation
will leave you with just the top bits of affected files.
thanks for ANY help I can get.
Sorry to thump you on the formatting, but really, that is a mistake
you must never make again. And sorry to be a bit pessimistic, but the
situation is pretty hairy, especially if NTFS.
If you give more detail on the HD (size, file system, partitioning,
what was wrong with it, what tools you have) I may do better.
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