undeleted video files not recognized

[pickeltruck]

Hi-

i have been researching this for a bit now since I discovered that somehow many of my files had been erased. i recovered a bunch of them using restoration software but they refuse to open. i've used a number of video restore programs. DivFix++ summed up the problem, i think: "error: input file is not an avi file"

it IS an avi file, so clearly it is damaged.

is there any way to deal with this?

and related to this, what does erasing a video file do to it? many of the recovered jpegs were fine, but none of the video files.

many thanks- there's lots of memories wanting to be restored.

peace-
andres

[Baldrick]

Big files are not easy to recover because parts of them are probably overwritten.

What tool(s) did you use to recover the files?
Have you used the HDD a lot before you discovered the erased files? You more you save new data on the HDD the harder it will be to restore the files without corrupt data.

[pickeltruck]

i used a program called freeundelete. i compared it to many other programs and it seemed to catch the same stuff.

and unfortunately i did not discover the loss until after i had been using the harddrive for at leat 2 weeks. its a data drive, used only for storage, so its not as heavily used, however, apparently enough damage has been done. i have not been saving anything to the drive for the past 5 days.

these files are not that large, >30mb

thanks!