recuva incomplete files?

[Ewing Fox]

My client accidentally deleted over 45 thousand photos of her *ahem* obsession (a young tennis star) and called me nearly in tears...

 

I came over and fired up recuva, set it to do a deep scan and left with instructions for her to let it sit. I came back later and discovered that she attempted to "follow the bouncing ball" but could not find any recovered files. I re-ran the program and it found the 45k files again, but this time no previews were available when viewed in recuva. I recovered all of them, but all files are now broken... unviewable.

 

Any suggestions? I was considering yanking the drive and running spinrite, but am nervous to do anything that may disrupt the disk any more...

 

The client is pro-bono, but I still want to help her...

 

Thanks in advance

 

Ewing Fox

email address removed by moderator to avoid spamming

[Augeas]

Certainly pulling the disk and running it as a slave data-only disk on another system will reduce the chances of anything being overwritten.

 

I assume you ran the recovery to another disk/partition? Although normal pc use will tend to overwrite some deleted data, losing 45k files is rather a lot. There hasn't ben a defrag or anything else major on this disk?

 

By all means try Spinrite - I have no knowledge of this at all but anything non-invasive is worth a try.

[Ewing Fox]

I had initiated the deep scan.... she had selected the same drive. I assume that the program overwrote the deleted files as recova did its thing...

 

Any hopes of a recovery? any advanced tools?? file recovery tools designed to recover data deleted with 3 pass algorithms... *thats why I use the dod 7 pass*

 

Ewing

 

Spinrite uses an algorithm to reorganize broken files.... think re-creating a chess game when the table is bumped... part math and part intelligent assumption. The issue is that data is assigned to new physical locations on the platter, so I don't think that would be good.

[Augeas]

It would appear that recovering to the same drive has overwritten just about everything that your client was attempting to recover. There is no software available that will recover data that has been overwritten. There will be a few scattered remains of the 45k files that will be good (I wouldn't imagine that the recover process writes in a one-to-one correspondence) but they might be tricky to find. You'll need to page through all the recovered files in thumbnails mode to see.