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Recovering large .mov from exFAT disk

Posted: 01 May 2014, 01:15
by plasticpool
Hello,

I'm attempting to recover a large Quicktime movie (50+ GB) from a 1 TB disk, originally exFAT, that was accidentally reformatted to HFS+, and would greatly appreciate any advice offered. The file was written to disk yesterday afternoon and the reformat happened shortly thereafter.

I ran the latest version of photorec overnight with the default options, "unknown partition" and "other" filesystem, and many video files were recovered, except the ones I need. The largest file recovered was a 20.64 GB Quicktime movie in the same format/resolution/etc as the files I'm trying to find.

Strangely, photorec recovered a number of the Quicktime files as .gz (as well as a few .MYI, .ab, .dbx, .tib, .apple, and .gbg) which I then successfully repaired with Grau's Video Repair tool (grauonline.de) and renamed to .mov.

I'm now running photorec again with several options changed (paranoid no, keep corrupted files yes, expert mode no, low memory no, and only .mov and .gz files selected in FileOpts. Hopefully this will turn up the missing file.

Again, any tips would be very much appreciated. Thanks!

Re: Recovering large .mov from exFAT disk

Posted: 02 May 2014, 13:42
by plasticpool
Update: success! The second run of photorec recovered the file (a 39.24 GB Quicktime movie), which upon further examination was uncorrupted.

For future searchers with this problem, I should share that the hard drive was from an Atomos Ronin video recorder, accidentally reformatted using Disk Utility.