MP3's and Pictures recovered unusable! help me please!

[jfk]

First, I appreciate free software, and was even going to donate $ if all my files were recovered correctly. However, 30 Gb's worth of music and photos were recovered in completely unusable condition. Hopefully someone can help me out here.

 

The mp3's are snippets of random songs. For example, an mp3 will have a file name "Frank Sinatra - New York New York" and be the right file size, but when you play the song it'll play some Metallica song for a while, then it'll change to some hip hop song, and on and on. Picture files won't even open anymore, and in fact the picture files recovered all have the right file names, but apparently only contain a few hundred Kbs of information.

 

What I'd really like to do now is undo whatever Recuva did to my computer so I can give it a try with another program. I was hoping this would work because paying for recovery would be VERY expensive (the first program I tried would've charged me more than $700 for 30 Gb's worth of recovery!). If anybody's had this problem and fixed it somehow, PLEASE help me out. I have about 70% of my pictures backed up on DVD's and whatever music I have on my Ipod, but I'd dearly love to have everything back the way it was. Thanks for any help.

[Guest MrRon]

What type of drive are you trying to recover from? e.g. NTFS or FAT? Also, are you restoring to the same drive?

 

MrRon

[Augeas]

Hmm, 30 gb is rather a lot to lose. You can't undo what Recuva has done. A run of Recuva will do very little apart from creating a few log files which will of course overwrite something or other. Using Recuva to recover files - 30 gb of them - most certainly will do something. If, as Ron asks, you have recovered these files to the same drive then they will have overwitten 30 gb of what is flagged as free space, which may or may not have been part of the 30 gb you were tying to recover. So in theory you could have had 30 gb of recoverable files, and the first file recovered overwrote the next file to be recovered, and so on to the end of the 30 gb. In practice it's probably partly what has happened.

 

Also every time you boot up or use your PC you will be overwriting files. Windows is always writing something or other, and surfing is ten times as bad. Even posting to this site kills something.

 

Rgds.