Problems trying to recover files after HDD quick format

For Christmas this year my HTPC decided to change 2 of my drives that i store all of my movies on to RAW File System. as im sure you can imagine i was over the moon.

i have done lots of reading and have found that its not possible to convert a drive back from RAW to FAT32 or NTFS unless you format the drive.

I have done a quick format to NTFS and i am now looking for a piece of software that will help me recover the .mkv .mp4 and .avi video files. i have tried recuva and it has done a deep scan and found all of the files and also tells me they are in excellent condition but it will not reover the files for me.

the files on the 1 TB drive restored ok but for some reason i am unable to recover the files on the 2TB drive. are there any limitations to restoring on a dive this size?

any help will be appreciated.

Merry Christmas

Darren

Have you tried (in Advanced Mode) Scan for Non-Deleted Files (do not enable deep scan)?

What reason does Recuva give for not recovering the files? Large (4 gb+) and very fragmented files are difficult to recover.

Hi Augeas,

the reason given for not being able to recover the files is "The Device Is Not ready" none of the files i am trying to recover are over 4 GB. i will try a Scan for Non-Deleted Files. if memory serves though if i do this i only get a list of XML documents that all have a byte count of 0 as they were recovered the very first time i run it

Darren

ok so i changed the setting in the options to only scan for Non-Deleted Files and did only bring back only the XML files associated to the movies files which it sort of restored last time and all have a 0 byte count.

is there anything else i can try?

Someone recently suggested that the Device not Ready message on external drives can be overcome by opening an existing file on the device, to kick-start the device into ready status.

I guess it's back to a deep scan if a normal scan only finds XML files. Recuva by the way will not alter the size of recovered files, they will remain just as they were, so I don't get the 'byte count of 0 as they were recovered the very first time' statement.