Recuva recovered files not working/corrupted

[Recuvyon381]

Hello. I am new to this "Recuva" thing. I had to struggle with getting my "permanently deleted" files back, until I found this software named Recuva. I thought this thing was helpful for recovering permanently deleted files, even the ones I find very important.

 

But however, I did a deep scan to search for the perm-deleted files, and the results came up. I checked all that are green-stated, and then recovered them. But when I open up every single file like a video or audio file, it just appears corrupted! And some of the files are 0 bytes. The recovering didn't work out good in my opinion. What am I doing wrong?

 

Thanks in advance.

 

- Dan

[Augeas]

Probably not a lot, but your conception of data recovery might be rather hazy. After all, 'Recovering permanently deleted files' is a little contradictory.  No deleted file can be guaranteed to be recovered, and no operating system cares about, or helps in, recovering deleted files.

A deep scan runs a normal scan first, and those with a file name will be from the normal scan, and  those with a numerical name in square brackets will be from the deep scan. The deep scan looks for a particular set of file signatures in every non-allocated cluster. Those clusters with a match are listed, along with the following clusters, until another cluster with a file header, or a live file, is found. Only the first extent of a file is found, as there is no way of linking extents, so video or audio files - which are usually large and more likely to be in multiple extents - are quite often unplayable.

The normal scan files are found by following the cluster addresses in the MFT. Recuva will recover whatever is in these clusters, whether they have all or partly been reused since file deletion. Any corrupt clusters are unlikely to display or play correctly. Very large files, over 4gb, will have the cluster addresses zeroed by NTFS so recovery is impossible. If the file system is FAT32 then the cluster addresses are half-zeroed by the O/S.

Zero byte files are only found with a normal scan. Naturally they can't be recovered.