Can any portion of a "corrupt" recovered video file be salvaged?

[tluxon]

I accidentally deleted some non-backed-up video files on my USB drive a while back, and most of them were recovered. However, some of the files that the recovery program reported as recovered can no longer be opened by any of the applications I have, including GSpot.

Some of this material was quite valuable to me, so I'm wondering if there is any kind of tool, utility, or method for salvaging the parts of the files, if any, that are preservable.

Any ideas?

[2Bdecided]

What was the video format?

[JackSnap]

whats the format and what are you using to play them,

Trying VLC player may have more success. If that manages to play them you can take it from there to reconvert to a valid format.

[tluxon]

What was the video format?MPEG-2 at 1920x1080, 30fps, approximately 11-13 Mbps.

Some of the recovered files had portions of video that had originally belonged to other files before the delete, so I don't even know for sure if the most valued material is even in the remaining files.

I just wonder if there are any tools that can find portions of files that have video segment/fragments that could be recovered.

[jeffy]

Some suggestions (and some of them are untested):
FreeUndelete http://www.officerecovery.com/freeundelete/
NTFS Undelete http://ntfsundelete.com/
Recuva http://www.recuva.com/
Roadkill's Undelete http://www.roadkil.net/program.php?ProgramID=28
PC INSPECTOR™ File Recovery http://www.pcinspector.de/Sites/file_recovery/info.htm?language=1
TestDisk http://www.cgsecurity.org/
DATA Unerase Personal Edition™ http://www.octanesoft.com/data_recovery_free_edition.html

and more:
http://www.thefreecountry.com/utilities/datarecovery.shtml

Please let us know if any of them helped.

[tluxon]

ntfsundelete (http://ntfsundelete.com/) is the program I used to recover the files originally. It won't be possible to try another program now that the source disk has been used for other things.

I was really wondering if there is anything that can scour recovered/"corrupt" files for valid video portions and rebuild them with a proper header so they can be played and/or opened by an editor of some sort.

[type1encryption]

testdisk!!

[tluxon]

testdisk!!The source disk has been reused extensively since file "recovery". How would testdisk help me with files that have already been recovered, but are corrupt?

At the very least, the header doesn't seem to even report a codec despite the indication by the filename that the recovered file was an mpeg.

[2Bdecided]

You'd think there'd be sync words in there that some tool could lock onto and extract any "good" remaining GOPs, packets, or whatever. PVAstrumento or ProjextX might work, but I don't know of anything else.

Cheers,
David.