I accidentally deleted a partition on a hard drive which had a lot of important documents on it.
I immediately used Recover My Files to recover the data and it seemed to recover them just fine, got everything back it seemed.
But when I try to open the documents, most of them just come up as corrupted.
The file sizes are correct so everything seems to be there, but the computer just seems to have a problem reading the data.
Has anybody got any ideas of how I can recover these files to their original, working state?

Based on your results (i.e. unusable files), that software seems to have done a raw recovery, which is not needed (and not sensible!) in the situation that you describe. I hope you have still written nothing to the original drive.


Correct file names/sizes does not mean correct file contents, especially if the recovery software has used file carving a.k.a. raw recovery.

Assuming that you understand & accept all the risks of DIY recovery attempts and based just on your comments and no other information, I would make a raw clone of the drive first (to provide a backup in the case of human error or bad luck during the next steps), then afterwards use software like Partition Find & Mount or manual reconstruction of the MBR, to re-instate the partition table. But there are other options, each with their own pros and cons - different people would use different techniques, so other members may suggest alternatives

Alternatively, if you are not confident in doing this, and/or if the data is very valuable and so you don't want to take the risks of DIY attempts, then a professional DR company isn't going to charge huge amounts of money to work on this type of issue - but I don't know of any such companies in Iceland.

Thanks for the info, Vulcan. I'll see what I can do and hope for the best!

What are the serial numbers of the following:

Drive you booted from?
Drive you recovered the files from?
Drive you recovered the files to?

Also, what do you mean by "deleted a partition"? My experience has found that this could mean a literal deletion to a wipe and reload of the OS over top of the data.

Assuming that it was a simple partition deletion and absolutely nothing has been written to the drive since the partition was deleted, it should be a fairly simple recovery.

One other question, what operating system/file system was on the drive?

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Luke
Recovery Force Data Recovery

Obviously if the OP didn't mean "deleted a partition" in exactly the way that term is used by fdisk / Windows Disk Manager etc., then my earlier advice would have been different... Good question

I accidentaly deleted the wrong partition while setting up XP. I then recovered the data using Recover My Files. After the recovery everything seemd to look good, all the files had been recovered, the file sizes were correct and everything seemed in order... so I created a new partition on the disk and copied the files back onto that partition. By doing that I assume I overwrote the legitimate files with the bogus ones... and now I think I'm screwed

Did you recover the files directly from the original disk to another disk?

If yes, did you create a new partition on the original disk and then copy the files from the temporary disk back to that newly created partition?

Where in this series of steps did you check the integrity of the recovered files?

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On a clear disk you can seek forever.

That's exaclty what I did, Keatah. I checked the integrity of the files after I had copied them over to the new partition on the original drive... stupid thing to do, i know! But that's that

I know it is too late, but this is one of the many reasons why it is critical to make a clone prior to recovery attempt. Now that corrupted data was written back to the drive, overwriting the good data, there is very little more that can be done. A pro might still be able to salvage a few files, but it is unlikely going to be a result that you would be any happier with. Sorry.

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Luke
Recovery Force Data Recovery