Data Recovery Forums - Help & Discussions

fireman9_999 · Joined: 14 Jan 2009 Posts: 1

I’m looking for some software that will check all the files from a recovery and indicate the “validity” of those files. More specifically are they complete, will they open, or are they corrupt?

I understand this is actually quite a little request. With all the file types out there and different formats of drives. NTFS is my largest concern at the moment.

I’ve looked into CRC and the like, the problem is you have to calculate some sort of hash prior to validating. Needless to say, in the recovery world that simply isn’t possible.

Any ideas or direction? Thanks in advance.

msjunk · Joined: 03 Mar 2009 Posts: 1

Strangely enough what I can tell you after searching on this topic for the last four hours for my own purposes, is that you might want to check out http://www.z-a-recovery.com/man-validation.htm which apparently is a tool that has some ability to check the validity of the data it recovers or that has been recovered. They actually list the file types that it can validate and it's reasonably comprehensive for common files types. I have not used it but it is the only thing I have seen after an extensive and exhaustive web search on the topic using a variety of appropriate search terms.

This sounds exactly like the type of capability I was looking for. Having recovered files to a different drive and system I was faced with manually opening or executing every application data file or application program that I had sitting around from folders on my old system. Fortunately my number of corrupt files ultimately was laborious but manageable yet the inconvenience made me search for a solution to facing this manual task in future.

Almost everything else available is more focused around CRC or MD5 style Hash file integrity checks which require that you have copies of these prior to any corruption. In reality I don't know many people who normally would.

Good luck.