repair recovered video files

[chetansha]

Hi, i had a virus attack and lost many files incl, vids. I managed to recover some of them using data recovery s/w. But now i am not able to play the files at all. Is there any way of repairing these videos?

[Baldrick]

https://www.videohelp.com/tools?s=12#12

[Bjs]

Drive rescue would have saved you this problem ... just need to make sure the option for hd format type is set correctly or the same thing will happen .

[chetansha]

lemme check some tools. and wot is drive rescue ?

[Bjs]

Drive rescue is a free file recovery program ... by far the best , no restriction's .

It will show you if a file is recoverable or not , if not you can still take a shot at it ... but 98% of the time it actually mean's it's gone .
It can also locate partition's that once existed on the drive as well ... so be mindfull as to which one you need to search .

Unlike many other similar tool's , it can recover all file type's , and as many as you need ... other program's have restriction's or "buy" feature to unlock these extra's ... utter crap most of them from my test's .

Drive rescue has saved me twice so far ... and many customer's which had there system's wiped by other so called pc tech's ... I atleast have been able to recover all their bussiness document's .

As with all these tool's ... there is one major notice .

The recovery of file's that have suddenly or recently been accidentally removed or deleted should be 100% recovered ... and this gose for complete ripped dvd title's as well .

This dose not cover where the harddrive has under gone "defrag" or "os reinstall" as the position of file's on the drive have been relocated .

This mean's : Be prepared to reinstall os if you do not heed the warning's .

If you watch what you are doing ... the most valuable file's can be recovered without this problem .

[DJ Kris]

Please help! About 2 weeks ago I accidently deleted all my videos files, most of which were MP4's of various mobiles phones I've had over the years. I paid fro a programe called UndeletePlus, this managed to find almost all the deleted videos and seemingly recover them. However most were muddled up, ie. the file names didn't match the videos and even worse, almost all my MP4's wouldn't play.

I've had a look at this thread and I'm currently trying to recover the files again using Drive Rescue in the hope it'll do a better job, although I'm struggling to understand how to use it.

Assuming the files still don't work, is there a decent free programe that will repair MP4's that have been recovered? The only one I could see on the list linked in this thread is way out of my price range

Can someone please help?

[Hoser Rob]

Depends. If the files were overwritten, no.

[DJ Kris]

Most of them were "Excellent" according to UndeletePlus.

[Hoser Rob]

undeleteplus may have said they were 'excellent' but if they can't be played anymore, what does that tell you? It tells me the program doesn't know what it's talking about.

From their web site: "Accidentally deleting a file from your computer, flash disk, camera, or the like does not mean it is lost forever. Software doesn’t destroy files when it deletes, it simply marks the space the file was using as being available for re-use. If nothing has needed that space since the deletion, the data is still there and the file can be recovered."

Note the last sentence. If you accidentally deleted something 2 seconds ago it's unlikely any of the sectors were over written. If you did it 2 weeks ago it's quite possible. All a recovery program can do is find the sectors that were originally allocated for the file. That doesn't mean the data is still there.

Try another tool that can actually tell you whether the data is recoverable or not. I haven't tried drive rescue mantioned above but it's worth as shot.

Note the tools in the link above are either free or trialware. It wouldn't hurt to try the trial period. But none of them are designed to fix overwritten data. They just find broken or corrupted frames and remove them and make the file understandable.

[aedipuss]

nothing is going to retrieve/fix those files now. the file system has re-used those sectors with other data and the file chains now contain corrupt data.

too late now but maybe you've learned a lesson. always back up important/non-replaceable files.

[DJ Kris]

Sorry, I didn't mak myself clear in the first post. Although it's been 2 weeks since it happened this is because I've been looking for a way to repair the files as I'd heard there is software that can do this. I actually retreaved the files within an hour of losing them. This was the length of time it took me to find a retreaval programme.

[aedipuss]

doesn't really matter with video files, no one ever seems to get them to work after a deletion. it's been asked many times before. all it takes is windows to write a single file in the background or close already opened files when you shut down to mess everything up and you wouldn't even know it had been done.

[DJ Kris]

Thanks, slightly gutted and very frustrated with myself!