Video Files Won't Play

[Spawn466]

Hey everyone, I could use some help. My hard drive got reformatted somehow when I was reinstalling windows and I lost all my data. The thing was that I was installing windows on a second hard drive and without doing anything the first one got reformatted. I used Recuva and performed a deep scan and got many files. My problem is that I recovered my video files that were in Excellent state and no overwritten clusters detected but half the videos won't play. I tried VLC, Media Player, etc, but no luck. When I go on properties for the ones that don't play have a file size that looks correct but they don't have things like video length, width, height.

 

Now I've used programs like Avidemux to mux/re-mux but I get an error. I also used a program named GSpot (which gives information on the file) and for the file type and mime type it says unknown. Which is weird because the files say they are either .mp4 or .avi. I also tried switching the extension on some of the files but no luck.

 

I was hoping someone could help me. Much appreciated!

[Augeas]

As deep scan only looks at unallocated clusters all files found will be marked as Excellent, i.e. not overwritten. However a deep scan will only recover the first extent of a fragmented file. Video files are usually large and quite likely to be fragmented. When Recuva finds a cluster with a video file signature it may continue recovering clusters sequentially until it hits the next cluster with a recognisable file signature, so you may recover a large file with invalid content (I don't know if this is how Recuva actually works). Whether this is the cause of your problems, and why the files won't start to play as far as they can, I don't know that either.

[Andavari]

I also used a program named GSpot (which gives information on the file) and for the file type and mime type it says unknown. Which is weird because the files say they are either .mp4 or .avi.

 

I wonder if in the case of the .avi only if FourCC Changer would work (I think that ability is also available in Avidemux that you mentioned). Maybe worth a try and it only takes seconds to use FourCC Changer! You may also want to give VirtualDub or VirtualDub Mod a try using the Direct Stream Copy on both the Video and Audio to re-save to a brand new video without re-encoding/transcoding.