Recovered data unplayable

[RonnyKedia]

Hi.

To cut the long story short, I recovered the contents (mostly videos) from my hard drive recently, which I had tried converting from NTFS to FAT32. The data has been recovered but none of the files are playing on VLC. Windows media player says the file is damaged or corrupt.
My hard drive is back to NTFS format. But the files aren't playing. Please suggest what might be wrong, which tool I can use to repair my video files?
Thanks. Appreciate any help

Ronny

[jman98]

Need more info. What did you use to convert the drive? Was the data on it while you converted? There is ALWAYS a chance of data loss when doing a conversion between NTFS and FAT32. There are ways to go from FAT32 to NTFS and if you are lucky you will not lose data but I don't think it's possible to go from NTFS to FAT32 without basically ruining just about everything on the hard disk. You should always treat such a conversion as having the potential for total loss of data and you have to backup anything you care about BEFORE you start so you can restore it afterward if you need to. I do not know of anything that can possibly repair your files now. There are programs that claim that they can convert without any loss from NTFS to FAT32 but you just learned that such claims are bs. Maybe every now and then the programs actually do convert without loss, but I wouldn't bet on it happening to me if I was going to do it.

[RonnyKedia]

Hi,

I used Aomei NTFS to FAT converter, and yes I had data on there. I realized only later, that the free version allows you only 8GB of conversion to FAT. Anyway, so my hard drive was showing data on there but none of it was playable/viewable.
You're right, these programs are bs, I should have moved my data to another drive before the conversion.
Anyhow, I converted my USB drive back to NTFS format and then ran Get Datas Recover my Files to get the data back. I had two search results, one with the FAT partition and one which says Lost files found. The FAT partition videos etc don't play although the names are intact. The Lost files found, ofcourse, incomplete but still 75% of what it was has been recovered, Although names have been changed and a lot of files are split, incomplete. (I keep getting the AVI chunk viewer pop up)
I'm trying to see if I can repair these lost files or if there's any way I can get the non playing files on the FAT partition (which returned more files) to play.

[Bjs]

Only chance of recovery would be by using testdisk and use in to locate the lost ntfs partition, then follow threw with locating folders/files ...

[zoobie]

It sounds like they've been changed to raw files. I used the free Minitool Power Data Recovery some time ago which was highly recommended. Incidently, data recovery is a huge scam of an industry. Try all free tools first.

[RonnyKedia]

@zoobie - I think you're right. Looks like they've been changed to raw files. Because they're just not playing, the file size etc seems to be in order. However, Minitool Power Data Recovery, the free edition, will convert only 1 GB of data.

Does anybody know to convert raw avi files back to normal?

[zoobie]

I think I used it to do exactly that - convert raw avi files back to normal. I don't know if this will work but you could try recovering 1gb then uninstall the Minitool Power Data Recovery completely using the free revo uninstaller and then try reinstalling MPDR for another 1gb of recovery. An alternative to this is to purchase the Pro version that doesn't have limitations. I guess it depends how valuable the lost video is to you.