"Recovering orphaned files"

[Tommy Boy]

So I have a big problem, here's what happened.

I was reinstalling Windows XP on my fileserver which consists of 1 30gb hard drive for the OS, 1 200gb hard drive for storage and 1 250gb hard drive also for storage. Windows XP install seemed to go fine and I thought everything was okay but one time when it was rebooting chkdisk started and started to scan, I thought this was odd but I let it do it's thing. Well what started coming up on the screen was "Recovering orphaned file" and a bunch of numbers and stuff, it did this for a whole bunch of files. I've never seen this before so I just let it go figuring everything would be okay after.

I was wrong......
When I went to one of my storage drives later on I found that a lot of the video files I have on there were pieces of music files I have stored on the hard drive as well, instead of the video file it's supposed to be. A lot of the video files are like this, but not all of them. Some of them are corrupt as well and will not play.

Has anyone ever heard of this happening and do you know of anything I can do to get the files back to the way they were?

As far as I know it just happened for video files, nothing else seems to be corrupt.

 

[iPwn]

On the root of the drive, do you have any "found.00x" files? Those could be the intact files with their extension changed.

 

[Tommy Boy]

No, I don't have anything like that.

 

[iPwn]

When I went to one of my storage drives later on I found that a lot of the video files I have on there were pieces of music files I have stored on the hard drive as well, instead of the video file it's supposed to be. A lot of the video files are like this, but not all of them. Some of them are corrupt as well and will not play.

I'm still a little confused as to what happened to your Video files, sounds like they got split into audio files

You can try a "chkdsk x: /f /r" on the drive to fix bad sectors and recover data. If that doesn't help, then I would suggest another data recovery software solution.

 

[Tommy Boy]

I'm still a little confused as to what happened to your Video files, sounds like they got split into audio files

You can try a "chkdsk x: /f /r" on the drive to fix bad sectors and recover data. If that doesn't help, then I would suggest another data recovery software solution.

When I double click the file, instead of the video that it's supposed to be, audio comes up instead, audio that I have stored as well. But it's parts of songs, like it starts in the middle and then when it's done a completely different song comes up. The video files are nowhere to be found. I read something about the master file table might be messed up and pointing the file to the wrong location on the drive but nobody knows how to fix that. Most of the files are like that but some are just plain corrupt and won't play at all.

 

[iPwn]

Have you tried the chkdsk x: /r /f command?

 

[Tommy Boy]

Yeah, I ran chkdisk again and it did nothing to help the files.

 

[summer]

I think the fast and efficient ways to recovery all the software are using the data recovery software, I had this same situation happen years ago and was able to completely recover a college thesis . You may have a try !