recovered files have wierd names and extensions: PLEASE HELP
Posted: Tue Feb 16, 2010 10:46 am
Hello All,
My HDD crashed suddenly one fine day (the message was login.dll not found or some such when i tried to login).
I store most of my important data in "My Documents/USER/" folder and the not-so-important data in "C:/DATA/". The funny thing is that when the damaged harddrive was accessed as a secondary harddisk, the USER directory in My Documents shows up as a ordinary file (and not as a folder) whereas all the other users (like Administrator and so on ) show up as proper folders. The data in C:/DATA also seems to be intact. The problem is with "MY Documents/USER" (would you know if there a specific way to solve this "folder-becoming-ordinary-file" problem)
Anyways, a friend of mine helped with restoring the data and used R-Studio NTFS to get the data back. He recovered 93GB of data which is all I think I had in the entire harddrive. The problem is that the folders are named "$$$Folder02212" and so on (I read about this on the FAQ page) and the filenames and extensions of the recovered files are just as badly messed up. For example, a file "AIDE.EXE-18CFF77F.pf" is a text file with some garbage in the end but plain text that I identify as one of my original data in the beginning of the file (not all the text is there though). and then there are some files which show some Chinese text when opened!! (Which is really weird because I don't know the first thing about Chinese and never had any files in Chinese).
Can you please please help me out with this. Was the R-Studio used in an incorrect way? Should we try the recovery with different settings? I am not sure if this friend of mine used a demo version or the full version of the R-Studio tool. I won't mind buying the tool if there is a decent chance of recovering the data.
Really appreciate all your help!
Thanks
Desperate user (just like everybody else who has a non-backed-up crashed HD).
My HDD crashed suddenly one fine day (the message was login.dll not found or some such when i tried to login).
I store most of my important data in "My Documents/USER/" folder and the not-so-important data in "C:/DATA/". The funny thing is that when the damaged harddrive was accessed as a secondary harddisk, the USER directory in My Documents shows up as a ordinary file (and not as a folder) whereas all the other users (like Administrator and so on ) show up as proper folders. The data in C:/DATA also seems to be intact. The problem is with "MY Documents/USER" (would you know if there a specific way to solve this "folder-becoming-ordinary-file" problem)
Anyways, a friend of mine helped with restoring the data and used R-Studio NTFS to get the data back. He recovered 93GB of data which is all I think I had in the entire harddrive. The problem is that the folders are named "$$$Folder02212" and so on (I read about this on the FAQ page) and the filenames and extensions of the recovered files are just as badly messed up. For example, a file "AIDE.EXE-18CFF77F.pf" is a text file with some garbage in the end but plain text that I identify as one of my original data in the beginning of the file (not all the text is there though). and then there are some files which show some Chinese text when opened!! (Which is really weird because I don't know the first thing about Chinese and never had any files in Chinese).
Can you please please help me out with this. Was the R-Studio used in an incorrect way? Should we try the recovery with different settings? I am not sure if this friend of mine used a demo version or the full version of the R-Studio tool. I won't mind buying the tool if there is a decent chance of recovering the data.
Really appreciate all your help!
Thanks
Desperate user (just like everybody else who has a non-backed-up crashed HD).