Strange file corruption (Murphy's Law)

pclab

pclab

Moderator
Hi Guys

I have a case here where I imaged a bad Toshiba. I dind't had many bad or skipped sectors (don't have the number here with me right now).
The thing is: I could find about 160GB of data that the client wanted, but she also wanted a folder containing about 2GB of pdf and doc files. None of those files are readable, all corrupted.
I find this strange, because can really this be a strike of no-luck, that the bad/skipped sectors could affect ALL those files?

I have passed several software and some can find the folders, others not even that...

Any hints?

Thanks
 
D

datahaze

Member
My guess would be that the MFT or equivalent where it stored data about those folders was somehow corrupted, so your data recovery tool reported "good sectors" and those sectors were fine, but they were the wrong sectors. That would explain these symptoms. If no logical file recovery tools can get the data, you can try file carving tools (called RAW mode in many tools) like photorec. If you open the files in a hex editor, do you see anything resembling word documents or are they just nonsense files?
 
Jared

Jared

Administrator
Staff member
Just out of curiosity, did you do any imaging by using "read by utility"? I've seen some cases where after switching out of that mode the drive will read just crap data until it's power cycled.
 
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