Corrupted AVI files after power failure

[Babaloo]

HI,
I'm a newbie here and I have some questions.I will describe my problem.
I was happy to buy and test e new SD 8Gb memory card for my Cannon PowerShot A550.Besides many photos, I made nice videos.I stored many of them (around 60Gb) on an extrnal USB HD(Verbatim 250Gb). A power failure happened during one of my working sessions. With difficulties, I went through the troublesome path of recovering my files from the HD, of which the most valuable were my videos.I managed to recovetr many pddf, midi, word, jpg, wav. files and about half of the videos.
I tried a dozen of recovery programs and with some success, I recovered many files. To make the story shorter, now there is about 20 Gb of avi files (MVI) that I cannot neither open nor repair. Some of the recovered avi files have only numbers for identification ( eg. _VI_1368 )and they play fine. Some others with their full name that I gave them upon storing them on the external HD (eg. Sunset August Home) - the size can be seen (sth like 1,041,998 ) bit whenI try to open them Windows Media Player says:Windows Media Player cannot play the file. The file is either corrupt or the Player does not support the format you are trying to play.
The same with other players, too. I tried fixing them with a dozen of utilities like: vlc-1.0.3-win32, Virtual Dub and many freeware programs for repairing AVI and MPEG, but nothing.They just say: cannot fix, or something similar without result.BTW:during recovery process, many chunk files resulted, some of them with .avi extension, too
I tried recovering data from my SD card, too. but the movies that I'd like to have seem to be overritten so many times that they cannot be traced anymore. How come some .avi files have their full name and their size can be identified?This is not the same case as with dowloaded avi file that need to have the header corrected, is it?
I managed to repair many .wav files that could not be played by media players with a nice program called AUDACITY.
canon ZOOMBROWSER does not open these .avi files, too.
My question is: Is there a way to repair these large AVI files in the same way (at least partially) or should I give up?
Help, please!

[aedipuss]

sorry but i think you know what the answer is. no, corrupted avi files can't usually be repaired.

a UPS! if you own a computer it needs to be hooked up to a Uninterruptable Power Supply - if for nothing more that to allow time to shut down without corrupting all the hard drives. 5 minutes of backup power.

[redwudz]

Try dropping them into MediaInfo. It sounds like you already tried playback with VLC with no results, and it''s fairly good at playing corrupted files. If neither of those programs see anything, then the files may be gone. Most repair programs just try to fix the headers, so if the video contents are badly damaged, they won't help. You may just have a basically empty container, though it shows a size in Windows Explorer.