Sony Media Player HDD

Recuva
1

Hey Piriform people!

A friend of mine has this Sony media player and asked me to retrieve the files after it said there was a HDD problem. When I put the HDD into my computer and started up my recently installed Windows 8.1, I installed Recuva. (Ofcourse in my own ssd to prevent overwriting the data on the drive.) Seeing that the drive wasn’t seen by Recuva and wasn’t assigned to a letter and was unformatted, I decided to format it to ExFAT. It’s a Maxtor drive with 160GB.

Now I tried a deep scan several times and it didn’t find anything. And on another program I could find the files, which apparently were all video .VOB’s, but not in the mapped structure. Any tips? Do I need to reformat the drive to something else?

Greets,

Bobberg

2

I would've said try what Alan_B mentioned the other day for a device Windows doesn't give a drive letter to work as a normal disk. But being that you've formatted the drive. :(

3

what sort of format did you do?

or if you are unsure, how long did it take (roughly)?

4

I'm sorry that I wasn't clear. It was a quick format. I work at a computer repair shop so I'm not completely non-competent hehe

5

if you have only ever done a quick format, the files on the drive should be there, they'll be 'lost' as it were, but there.

the quick format plays with the MBR, file table and partition table but I'm not sure what effect changing to exfat would have done.

have you tried the work-around by @Alan_B which @Andavari linked to in post 2?

also, just clutching straws here, try connecting the drive to a Linux PC and seeing if it has any better luck.

6

I don't know what file system Sony Media Player uses, possibly some FAT variant or even ext3. However a quick format, as has been stated, will only overwrite the file directory and FAT tables (I guess that should be FA Tables, but you get what I mean). But files on the disk will be the same format whatever the file system.

I'm surprised that Recuva, being able to do a deep scan, found nothing. Do you really mean zero files? Without any file filtering? How long did it take to run?

Video files, being large, are quite likely fragmented. Even if a deep scan finds them, or some of them, it will only find the first fragment of any fragmented file. This probably applies to the other software that found the VOB files, unless it's exceedingly clever or expensive.

Another option is to try a normal scan with Scan for Non-Deleted Files checked. This might, just might, find some of the files. It won't affect what's on the disk. Unfortunately in file recovery there are no secrets or guarantees.

7

I don't know what file system Sony Media Player uses, possibly some FAT variant or even ext3. However a quick format, as has been stated, will only overwrite the file directory and FAT tables (I guess that should be FA Tables, but you get what I mean). But files on the disk will be the same format whatever the file system.

I'm surprised that Recuva, being able to do a deep scan, found nothing. Do you really mean zero files? Without any file filtering? How long did it take to run?

Video files, being large, are quite likely fragmented. Even if a deep scan finds them, or some of them, it will only find the first fragment of any fragmented file. This probably applies to the other software that found the VOB files, unless it's exceedingly clever or expensive.

Another option is to try a normal scan with Scan for Non-Deleted Files checked. This might, just might, find some of the files. It won't affect what's on the disk. Unfortunately in file recovery there are no secrets or guarantees.

It's funny that you should say that... I had to pay for the other software. The scan was free though! Indeed, it found alot of smaller sized .vob files. Tried a few deep scans and Recuva can't find anything... I'll try to do the normal scan with non-deleted files checked this weekend. Thanks for the help guys :)

Edit: and if that doesn't work I'll try to re(quick)format it to NTFS and try a deep scan... Haven't tried yet and I don't see the harm in it ;)