Has anyone tried recovering an .ISO file and were you successful? I have 3 files I am trying to recover, all are large files, 3-4GB each. don't show up in any of the scans I did. They are on an external USB hard drive of 2TB. Any suggestions?
I don't think and I can't see any reason why .iso files couldn't be recovered, any more or less than any other file. As far as I know any file extension, or none at all, in the MFT will be listed and recoverable, subject to what follows. The assumption here is that the file system is NTFS.
If you are running a normal scan then the entry in the MFT for the files may have been overwritten by subsequent allocation of newer file. It all depends on how much the external drive has been used since the deletion. If this is so then it is bad news. Although the file data may still be available on the disk it is likely to be fragmented and a deep scan (the only option is the file is not found in a normal scan) will only retrieve the first extent.
However if any file greater than 4gb is deleted then NTFS itself will overwrite the cluster addresses and a normal scan will not be able to recover the file. I don't know why it does this but it looks as if you are er, out of luck.