Data Recovery Forums - Help & Discussions

mdniederhauser · Joined: 03 Dec 2009 Posts: 3

I was a moron and while juggling around a bunch of new drives accidentally reformatted the most important one that I was trying to back up in the first place. It contained over six months of important image files. I am a professional photographer so this is a bit of a disaster. I use a MacBook Pro with Mac OS X 10.6.2 and the drive was initially formatted and then reformatted as a 1.5TB external, Mac OS Extended Journaled HFS+, with a single partition. Also, the drive has no physical issues.

There were a bunch of different file types on the drive, but I am only trying to recover my RAW image files which are CR2 (Canon Camera Raw) and DNG (Adobe Digital Negative) file types. I have, of course, not copied anything else onto the drive since reformatting and first used Data Rescue 3 by Prosoft. It recovered all the files, but I found that a lot of the DNG and CR2 files were corrupted with some image files overlaid with blocks of other images or riddled with large bands of noise. Is this because my drive was fragmented in the first place? Is there any way of improving upon these results? I also found this strange since when I recovered some larger movie files (800MB and up) they were not fragmented or corrupted.

Also, would I be better off using photo specific recovery software like PhotoRec by Christopher Grenier or PhotoRescue by DataRescue? Any other suggestions or advice would be greatly appreciated.

I AM DESPERATE!!!

vicky · Joined: 07 Mar 2007 Posts: 60

Hi,

The size of your drive is too big and you have been using the drive for only 6 months so chances of fragmentation are rare so I think image recovery software should work. Try using other image recovery softwares as well.

If the files are corrupt or don't get recovered using image recovery software, this means that there is fragmentation. Then you should use any HFS recovery tool with advanced scanning options. Try using recovery software for HFS in advance or formatted mode and you will get your data back.

mdniederhauser · Joined: 03 Dec 2009 Posts: 3

Well, the hard drive was rather full after only six months of use. I take a lot of photos. Also, can you be more specific about an HFS recovery tool with advanced scanning options. Do you know of any in particular? Also, what type of options should I be looking at in an advanced or formatted mode. Please be more specific.

Thanks for your help.

web.data · Joined: 07 Feb 2009 Posts: 24

For data recovery from HFS+ file system, check out Kernel for Mac recovery software in following link:

nucleustechnologies.com/Macintosh-Data-Recovery-Software.html

Hope this will solve your problem.....

Good Luck

mdniederhauser · Joined: 03 Dec 2009 Posts: 3

Does the Nucleus Technologies software handle fragmentation? That seems to be the core of my problem right now. Does anybody know of any data recovery tools that can handle file fragmentation on an HFS+ formatted drive?

web.data · Joined: 07 Feb 2009 Posts: 24

Sorry for late reply...

Ok you were talking about fragmentation.

Well fragmentation is just a process of breaking any file in two or more pieces. These fragmented files are also just like any other file available on your hard drive before formatting.

In that case it should work for you Smile

Jamescrowe · Joined: 03 Nov 2010 Posts: 1

Hi,

You can recover files which have emptied from the Recycle Bin by using File recovery tool. This software recovers files even if emptied from the Recycle Bin, accidental format, from reinstalled windows, disk recovery after a hard disk crash, from partitioning error etc. Even this file recovery tool recovers RAW files. This software works with Mac operating system as well as Microsoft windows 7, vista, 2003, XP and 2000. And also recovers deleted emails of Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Outlook express.