Need help with how to procede ...

Recuva
1

So I accidently deleted everything on 2 of my external hard drives. one of them is 500gb and the other 1tb. I downloaded Recuva (1.40) and scanned them (enabled deep scan) and then once it was done i recovered everything on another hard drive I enabled folder structure aswell. Now I'm looking at what has been recovered and a lot of things are missing. My main concern here is my pictures, some of them are recovered but most of them are "corrupt or damaged" as Photo gallery says when I try to open them.

Now the weird thing is that when I open those corrupt jpg files in VLC, it starts playing music. It's as if small parts of my songs were overwritten over those jpg.files.. Its just weird because the format is still jpg but it plays music! Now I don't know if i did something wrong or if its because of the software im using.... are my pictures gone for good? :(

i'd appreciate any kind of help!! thank you :)

2

You will need pro-level services to effect a logical recovery and filesystem re-build.

3

i doubt you did anything wrong and redoing the Recuva would only achieve the same results.

the fact that music is intermingled with JPG's confirms the "corrupted or damaged" status reported by Recuva.

Recuva is good but it is by no means great. it provides the occasional 'dodged a bullet that time' experience and is no replacement for a good backup regime.

sadly it seems it's not up to the job for you in this case (if anything will be) as it seems the deleted space on those drives must have been accessed/used between the files being deleted and the Recuva process.

i concur with @Keatah that it's time to stop play around and, budget permitting, seek hired help.

so instead of asking "are my pictures gone for good" it's more timely to consider "can I afford to get my pictures back" :)

(Psst - and do some backups !)

4

Thanks for the reply guys... It makes sense what you are saying. I was just wondering if you knew how much it would cost me approximately? If it is a reasonable price.. i wouldn't mind paying to save old memories

i doubt you did anything wrong and redoing the Recuva would only achieve the same results.

the fact that music is intermingled with JPG's confirms the "corrupted or damaged" status reported by Recuva.

Recuva is good but it is by no means great. it provides the occasional 'dodged a bullet that time' experience and is no replacement for a good backup regime.

sadly it seems it's not up to the job for you in this case (if anything will be) as it seems the deleted space on those drives must have been accessed/used between the files being deleted and the Recuva process.

i concur with @Keatah that it's time to stop play around and, budget permitting, seek hired help.

so instead of asking "are my pictures gone for good" it's more timely to consider "can I afford to get my pictures back" :)

(Psst - and do some backups !)

5

Before you go down the costly pro recovery route, I would try something else which will cost you nothing but time and effort.

To save my fingers I'll link you to a thread pertaining to my first "need" for the services of Recuva ...

http://forum.pirifor...91

How I carried out the actual recovery made a huge difference to the result.

Secondly, a free application called "IrfanView" has managed to open, for me and others, photographs which Windows Picture Viewer and even Photoshop wouldn't open.

http://www.irfanview.com/ (Free)

Worth a try even if you get zero success, but nothing ventured nothing gained is the way I look at it. It does sound like some of your stuff is pretty messed up, but you may get something.

Long shots but at least worth a try, especially the manner of recovery. Although on a much smaller scale to your situation, I managed to turn a dismal result into a 100% recovery.

6

just to give you an idea of what you may be in for, cost wise, if you go down the professional help path.

there is a data forensic recovery lab i put my clients onto when i can't retrieve data.

they are the whole nine yards; white coats, positive air pressure, dust free rooms, goat entrails, sacrificial virgins (ok, not the last two).

here's the 8 of them who have used their services; $1650, $3500, $1400, $900, $1500, $900, $2385, $1400 ($AUD)

so, not cheap, but these pro mobs usually do a no data - no fee service.

so definitely do whatever you want first, and give @DennisD idea a go, but just keep in mind, any tinkering you do may make future recovery harder.

bit of a damned if you do, damned if you don't sort of poisoned chalice. :)

7

just to give you an idea of what you may be in for, cost wise, if you go down the professional help path.

here's the 8 of them who have used their services; $1650, $3500, $1400, $900, $1500, $900, $2385, $1400 ($AUD)

in case original poster is not in Australia ;)

http://coinmill.com/AUD_calculator.html

8

I will take a GUESS and say between $250-$750 US Dollars. This is a logical recovery, and I don't believe there is any need for cleanroom or advanced laboratory services. In fact, if you have a fast internet connection, a disk image can be uploaded to the recovery company, and they re-build the file system, and post the results on a secure FTP server. They may also have their technician connect directly to the system and work from there.

The problem (and costly manual labor) comes in when you have to work with fragmented files on a FAT system. And I suspect your disk is FAT. As are most off-the-shelf removable disks, unless you reformat them to the more robust NTFS. -- http://www.forensics...T#Data_Recovery -- The way to work around this is using some trick software (typically proprietary to the data recovery company) that can do automated file carving -- http://en.wikipedia....ki/File_carving --. Or get out a disk editor and do it yourself (ungodly tedious!)

9

I do not see how the major collection of files on a 1000 GB drive can be corrupted by simple deletion,

unless they were subsequently over-written.

Did you delete all and then re-use to store other things for a long time before you realised ?

Or do you mean that you WIPED the drives with a Secure Deletion OVER-WRITE,

in which case I would expect VLC to produce random static noise rather than musical melodies.

It is just possible that you have done something which appears catastrophic but actually has a simple fix - if we knew exactly what you did.

A screen shot of what Windows Disk Management shows for these drives might be useful.

10

If the files were fragmented (in FAT volume) and deleted, the locations and pointers to all the fragments are gone. A program may begin with any one file header and not know how to jump around and collect its other correct fragments, thus running over other files in the process and collecting wrong parts.

This doesn't happen in NTFS. NTFS leaves behind pointers that can allow a program to jump around and get all correct fragments and assemble them in order.

11

@Keatah

I knew that in theory NTFS was more secure than FAT.

A few years later I experienced it when my partition tables were damaged and all partitions were lost,

but the previously downloaded and burnt to CD Minitool Partition Wizard restored them all,

BUT when I was able to boot up the first thing Windows demanded was a Checkdsk Reboot for a damaged FAT32 partition,

and it fixed a mass of errors.

As a precaution I also chose to run chkdsk on all the other partitions,

and zero errors were found on all 5 NTFS partitions

but minor errors were found on the remaining FAT32 partition.

Thanks for explaining this further problem that comes with FAT32.

Does the bad news never end :(

12

The bad news end swhen people learn to make backups.