Operating system: Windows 10 Home (10.0, Build 15063)
Related HDD: Seagate Barracuda 7200.7, 160GB Sata, access via external usb

Hello Guys,

in 2011 i made some video recordings on my computer, which i saved some in AVI and some in WMV format. Unfortunately i formatted the harddrive a few years after, and also i stored some other data, like 20 gb out of 160 on it after the formatting, and now im trying to get any usefull images or even the whole video back.

when searching for lost data with recovery programs, recently i used recuva, i find the 3 files, including size information (2x wmv -> 35mb, 1300mb, avi -> 2600 mb) and it even says the data has not been overwritten and is in excellent status to recover, so i successfully recovered the files, but i cant open them with any player vlc included. I also tried to convert the files to other formats with vlc and other programs but the result is a 0byte file that cant be played either.

So i tried to analyse the file format with TrID and found out that there is no match with any known file extension.

I am able to open the files with Hex Editor, and the Avi file definetly missing the normal RIFF header, so it doesnt appears to be an avi at all.

So now my question, is there any way to extract informations out of those files, i mean the files are huge and theres loads of data written in it, even tho the hex entrys doesnt make sense to me.

i was thinking of recompiling it somehow, or if there is a programm that conversts hex code sections in any usefull other informations, like jpg or other formats..

So yea and repairing the files with a vast amount of tools for either wmv or avi files failed aswell, since they dont recognize the files as media files at all.

Any help would be greatly appreciated,
Thanks in advance =)

If you have quickly formatted and then overwritten surface, probably most of the previous filesystem (or even all filesystem) is gone.
Without a valid filesystem you can't recover folders but you might be able to recover files by carving them from surface (raw scan), if clusters where they were saved got overwritten then you will not be able to recover those, or you might be able to recover those only partially, in this last case you will get damaged file (you would not be able to reproduce the video on your software player or it would reproduce it but partially and with timing errors, artifacts, etc).
Another reason that you get corrupted video is due to files fragmentation, without a valid filesystem is not possible to rebuild fragments by using software as Recuva, R-Studio etc, you might have much more luck by using forensics tool that is able to rebuild multimedia file fragments, example with CnW Data Recovery
https://www.cnwrecovery.com/

_________________
My firmware database:
https://mega.nz/folder/O01DkBRI#MxP2J6ZNqXDcrX40I8MoQQ

P.S.
Of course you shouldn't recover files by saving them on source drive, otherwise cluster would be overwritten and lose data most likely definitively, hope that you have used a third drive to save output file.

_________________
My firmware database:
https://mega.nz/folder/O01DkBRI#MxP2J6ZNqXDcrX40I8MoQQ

Don't think Recuva is telling the truth. Based on your hex analysis, the files likely got partially or fully overwritten, hence 0Kb in size.

_________________
Hard Disk Drive, SSD, USB Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

With R-Studio you could open each file as a volume image file (“Open image” button on the “Device view” tab), then scan it with “Extra search for known type files” box checked : this will find anything that corresponds to a pre-defined file type inside those files.

You can do that with Photorec also, which is free : you have to open the program in command line and add the name of a file to open it as a volume image ; or you can right-click on the file and select “Open with”, then search for photorec.exe.

Both softwares let you select which kinds of file types are to be searched ; they have different levels of efficiency, depending on the file type (R-Studio used to be lacking for the correct detection of MKV files, but has improved lately [*], and it recognizes more file types, and seems to better deal with false file signature, with Photorec a legitimate file can be truncated by a false JPG or MP3 file, if those extensions have been checked, I have yet to send a report of my findings to the dedicated forum).

But in any case there's little chance that you will find the videos that you are looking for, and even if only the header had been overwritten it would be very difficult to make the video and audio stream readable again (it can work for MPEG files). I'd be curious to know why Recuva reports them as being in “excellent” state though... (But I've already seen cases where it reported unreliable information regarding file integrity.)


[*] I may have contributed to that :
https://forum.r-tt.com/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=9079