Can you folks recommend software that can recover deleted videos?

[peggypwr1]

Hello, I am going to have to reformat my HDD. I have a ton of videos this HDD. Is there any software that can recover a majority of the video files? Thanks.

[aedipuss]

copy off the videos before the format or you risk losing all of them. if you perform a "full" format all data will be overwritten and most likely gone. if you can't get them off now they are probably already lost.

[gll99]

You say you will have to format the drive. Why? Is it already damaged in some way so you can't access the data?

[AlanHK]

Just what is wrong with the disk?

If the MBR is damaged, try testdisk

Install the damaged drive as a secondary. You can't run a recovery program on the same disk .

[peggypwr1]

I tried to re-install WIndows , but it says The parition got damaged some how and that I need to format. I really don't want to do that.

So, I took my old 80 gig HDD and setup that up as the master w/the damaged HDD as the slave. I put windows on my old 80 gig and booted her up. WIndows explorer shows my damaged HDD as the D drive but it will not let me access the drive w/o formatting?

Am I screwed?, just b/c WIndows casnnot install, I have to format. Is there someway to bypass the O/S to get my files transfereed somewhere else?

[aedipuss]

now that you can boot and have the damaged drive hooked up, run a data recovery program. i can't recommend any one program but you can try any of these free ones listed here that match your hard drive format or there are many commercial one also.

http://www.freebyte.com/filediskutils/#datarecovery

[t0nee1]

Not quite sure,but maybe boot from a linux distro cd, and you might be able to access drive with your videos and copy to disc's....as I said I'm not sure it'll work but maybe give it a shot.....

[peggypwr1]

Are the free ones just as effective as the commercial ones? The file structure is NTFS (WIndows 2000).

[peggypwr1]

Oh Jeez, I need to mention this. The damaged HDD is 320 Gig ( I have about 130 gigs written to it). Does WIndows or the file recovery prgrams need to see it as the whole drive. Right now I think it sees only 130 of the 320 size.

[AlanHK]

I tried to re-install WIndows , but it says The parition got damaged some how and that I need to format. I really don't want to do that.

So, I took my old 80 gig HDD and setup that up as the master w/the damaged HDD as the slave. I put windows on my old 80 gig and booted her up. WIndows explorer shows my damaged HDD as the D drive but it will not let me access the drive w/o formatting?

Am I screwed?, just b/c WIndows casnnot install, I have to format. Is there someway to bypass the O/S to get my files transfereed somewhere else?

Did you try testdisk, as I mentioned above? That should restore the partition structure.

It reads the entire disk looking for partition patterns, so it takes a while.
For a 320 GB disk it will take several hours, or longer, to analyse.

[peggypwr1]

Ok, I will try that, Right now I'm at work! Hee Hee

[peggypwr1]

TestDisk only sees 128 of my 320 gig. It says that it needs to see the whole drive size for it to work correctly. I need to figure out how do that again.

[Wile_E]

You can try Recuva, which is made by the makers of CCleaner. But the drive needs to be mounted as a drive letter. In other words, Windows needs to be able to see it.

http://www.recuva.com/