trying to recover deleted files (not having much luck)

[tnutt1105]

another stupid problem that I brought on myself. I deleted what I thought were useless files, I had renamed a folder that was valuable to me so that it would appear irrelevant to anyone who saw the name. Problem is that it showed up in a search that I performed to delete "irrelevant" files... see where I'm going with this? the files were then removed from the recycle bin as well.

Ok...I recovered most of the files with a recovery program but now I can't read 90% of the recovered files. I've tried most of the programs that I have. Some say "unknown file format" some photo files say "no preview available". The txt files are in some weird mime type format that none of my office programs can read.

I'm ready to just delete em all and say to hell with it.

any ideas that don't have me deleting them?

[Soopafresh]

http://www.free-av.com/antivirclassic/avira_unerase.html
http://www.softperfect.com/products/filerecovery/
http://www.undelete-plus.com/
http://www.recuva.com/
http://www.adrc.net/data_recovery_software/ADRC_Data_Recovery_Tools_v1.0.zip


All free. Good luck.

[redwudz]

I'd give Soopafresh's file recommendations a try. But unless you immediately isolate the hard drive with the lost files, Windows may use the free space and overwrite them and really mess them up. But good luck.

[tnutt1105]

I've already used the "undelete plus" program to recover the files,but...many of the files can't be read.

most are jpeg,png files... some are tmg which I realize I will probably never get back.

[tnutt1105]

my bad... typo .tmp

[Soopafresh]

They all work a bit differently so it is possible (although far from probable) that some of the files can be recovered by trying one of the other apps. I've had similar experiences to yours, where the file names were found, but once clicked on, the damage was obvious. There's one app that gets a lot of kudos - Google- Restoration File Recover Data

[Bjs]

http://www.woundedmoon.org/win32/driverescue19d.html ... one of the better one's for free .

[tnutt1105]

thanks for all of your help tried many of the suggestions

not much luck oh well thanks again