corrupt mjpegs??

[disastermaster]

A couple of months ago I captured (via mmg200) five avi files off the tv in the highest mjpeg setting. These files were approx 1.8gb each. They all played perfectly.Stupidly I formatted the drive they where on
But I recovered them with easyrecovery pro
But allthough the files are recovered and as far as I can see they are the same size as thet were originally, they cannot be recognised in any prog I try to open them with. These progs include virtualdub. I get this message when opening them with mediaplayer

Cannot open 'D:\rec\avis\A02PPL2.AVI'. Please verify that the path and filename are correct and try again.

and this with vdub "cannot determine file type"

Has anyone got any clues how to fix these files?

cheers

[Ted222]

disastermaster,

Maybe try moving the file, or see if MSP or Video Studio will open it.

good luck,

Ted

[Brian Ellis]

Oh, Master of Disaster!

I have a little feeling that there is little you can do. The best chance you may have is trying to copy them to another defragged partition but my guess is that this is remote. I've tried recovering large files and, to say the least, this is hairy, especially if they were fragmented in the first place. You see, there is an area at the beginning of each partition where there is a kind of index where the contents of each file are. Now, it only requires a tiny bit overwritten and the whole file becomes useless and you get lost clusters and all sorts of nasties. When this kind of thing happens, there is little that can be done, as a rule. I did have one case where I lost a long .txt file where I was able to stitch the bits back together again from the lost files after running ScanDisk but only because I could recognise where they came from. With an AVI file, there is little hope of being able to do this.

Alternatively, send the hard disk (without doing anything else to it) to one of the disk recovery specialists that advertise in the PC comics and see whether they can do something.